Web-based Technologies Integration for Distributed Manufacturing Scheduling in a Virtual Enterprise

Today’s manufacturing enterprises face enormous competitive pressures stemming from the current dynamic and open business context. Global competition and market demand for customized products and services, delivered ‘just in time’, exert real stress on businesses. Recently, new production paradigms, such as the extended enterprise, as well as agile, virtual and networked manufacturing, have appeared in response to the increasingly dynamic conditions of the marketplace. These new concepts prompt geographically dispersed manufacturers to build alliances with their suppliers and customers in order to work more closely with them. They need to work to build manufacturing networks which bridge large sections of the supply chain. In this context distributed scheduling problems are challenging tasks to researchers and practitioners that have been gaining increasing popularity over the years. This is partly attributed to the fact that multi-site production and networked manufacturing environments are increasing as a consequence of globalization. In this paper a web based system for technologies integration for supporting distributed scheduling in a Virtual Enterprise, by combining a simulation-based approach, with the Hungarian algorithm, for solving job-shop scheduling problems is presented, in order to show how the authors can benefit from this technologies integration for supporting collaborative distributed manufacturing scheduling.