Case Study Analysis of Job Shop Scheduling and its Integration with Material Requirement Planning

Now a days, an integrated manufacturing environment is essential in modern manufacturing industries. To achieve
truly integrated manufacturing systems, the integration of Material Requirements Planning (MRP) and job shop is essential.
In the job shop scheduling problem n jobs have to be processed on m different machines and each job consists of a
sequence of tasks that have to be processed during a fixed length on a given machine for an uninterrupted time period. In
this work, enterprise application framework for integrating MRP with job shop scheduling is developed. This integrated
system consists of two modules. First module provides a common material representation for material requirement planning
and scheduling to tackle the variability in job durations and machine allocations. The second model provides an integrated
heterogeneous manufacturing facilities with feasible production schedule. At the first stage, the application accepts the
customer’s order and performs material requirement planning. Further the master production schedule dispatches the daily
planned order with all production resource requirement to job shop. At the same time, MRP sends order to supplier for
purchasing raw materials. Shuffled Frog Leaping Algorithm (SFL) is used to find an optimum schedule as well as refine the
makespan results. Once the customers add or modify orders, MRP system will update the resource data automatically and
respond to the changes of customer requirements rapidly. In this integrated application, the MRP subsystem has been
proposed to computerize the existing system with VB.NET and MYSQL Server to perform Business-to-Customer
transactions and MRP logic, while the job shop simulator generates different sequences randomly and using Gantt chart
initial makespan was calculated. Initial solutions refined with SFL algorithm and optimum schedule is generated. MYSQL
Server Module is used for integrating MRP with Job shop simulator using Visual Basic .NET as the front end and MYSQL
as the back-end tool. Finally, the computer based integrated system is developed and tested. It performs well in terms of
changing requirements of customer and also it minimizes the makespan with SFL algorithm.