A Web-Based Material Requirement Planning Integrated Application Liao Qiang, Tham Chen Khong, Wong Yoke San, Wang Jianguo, Chris Choy Laboratory for Concurrent Engineering & Logistics (LCEL) Department of Mechanical Engineering National University of Singapore 10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119260 E-mail: mpeliaoq@nus.edu.sg Abstract The paper exploits distributed object technology to develop an enterprise application that integrates material requirement planning (MRP) with job shop simulator. The application aims to realize an integrated system that has rapid response to changing requirements and capability to integrate heterogeneous manufacturing facilities. At first, the application accepts the customer’s order and performs material requirement planning. Then MRP dispatches daily planned order to job shop that carries out real-time scheduling and production. At the same time, MRP sends order to supplier for purchasing raw materials. After completing production task, the job shop returns the relevant information about finished parts. Once the customers add or modify orders, MRP system will update data automatically to respond to the changes of customer requirements rapidly. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is applied for analyzing and designing total application in which MRP subsystem uses Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) that are deployed in a J2EE compliant application server to perform Business-to-Customer transactions and MRP logic, while the job shop subsystem uses Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) specification as communication platform. 1. Introduction Due to the customized production, shorter product life cycle and frequent process reengineering, today’s global business competition is imposing special requirements to manufacturing enterprises, such as rapid response to changing requirements, reduction in both time and cost of the product realization process. In addition, most of the manufacturing enterprises are often heterogeneous with respect to computer platforms, operating systems, network capabilities, and custom and commercial software. Further, it may be geographically distributed across a wide area. The information architecture itself must be scalable, interoperable and reconfigurable. Internet technology, electronic data exchange, and industry standards for interoperability will be core to the infrastructure [1]. The application developed in this paper aims to realize an integrated system which has rapid response to changing requirements and capability to integrate heterogeneous manufacturing facilities. The application consists of two subsystems as follows: • Web-Based Material Requirement Planning (MRP) The paper utilizes several emerging technologies such as Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) as well as Extensible Markup Language (XML) technology to establish a web- based MRP system that considers the process that begins when an order is placed by a customer and ends with the production of the corresponding item. All works are done on server-side. Three kinds of users, i.e. customer, administrator and supplier may access this system through web browser from anywhere and at anytime in the world. • CORBA-Based Job Shop Simulator. To simulate the real heterogeneous manufacturing environment, the paper use CORBA as communication platform to develop a job shop simulator in which CORBA objects represent corresponding manufacturing devices. After receiving the customer’s order, MRP system performs material requirement planning. Then MRP dispatches daily planned order to job shop that carries out real-time scheduling and production. On the other hand, MRP sends purchased order to supplier for needed raw materials. After completing production task, job shop returns finished parts to MRP. Once the customers add or modify orders, MRP system may update data automatically so as to rapidly respond to change of customer requirement. The paper describes how to use distributed object technology to develop modularized, distributed,