AN EFFICIENT IMPLEMENTATION OF 1 MATERIAL REQUIREMENTS PLANNING BY USING CACHE MEMORY D. Blonis S. Nikoletseas D. Sofotassios A. Spiliou P. Spirakis D. Thilikos V. Triantafillou Coputer Technology Institute Patras University, Greece PO BOX 1122, 26110, Patras, Greece email : spiliou@cti.gr Abstract This paper describes an efficient way to implement a Material Re- quirements Plan (MRP) which results in reducing the time needed to create this plan. Our approach is based on a) a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure for the representation of BOM (Bill Of Ma- terials) and b) a complex structure of linked lists to keep demand for parts, while exploding BOM and calculating MRP. During the com- putation, both structures are stored in a cache memory which allows a very efficient data retrieval. Keywords: Production Planning and Control, Bill-Of-Materials, Material Requirements Planning, Directed Acyclic Graph, cache memory, current re- quirements structure. 1 This work was partially supported by the CEC ESPRIT Special Actions project DELTA-CIME and by the CEC STRIDE project TEXTILE. 1