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Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Procedia Manufacturing 00 (2019) 000–000
Procedia Manufacturing 00 (2019) 000–000
ScienceDirect www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia
www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia

Procedia Manufacturing 38 (2019) 1532–1539

29th International Conference

29th International Conference on
on Flexible
Flexible Automation
Automation and
and Intelligent Manufacturing
Intelligent Manufacturing
(FAIM2019), June 24-28, 2019, Limerick, Ireland.
(FAIM2019), June 24-28, 2019, Limerick, Ireland.
Development
Development of
of aa Cloud-based Advanced Planning
Cloud-based Advanced Planning and
and Scheduling
Scheduling
System for Automotive Parts Manufacturing Industry
System for Automotive Parts Manufacturing Industry
Jen-Li Liu, Li-Chih
Jen-Li Liu, Li-Chih Wang
Wang &
& Pei-Chun Chu
Pei-Chun Chu
Department of Industrial Engineering and Enterprise Information, Tunghai university, Taiwan
Department of Industrial Engineering and Enterprise Information, Tunghai university, Taiwan

Abstract
Abstract
Facing the global trend of smart manufacturing, many countries around the world proposed its industry policy of smart factory, in
Facing the global trend of smart manufacturing, many countries around the world proposed its industry policy of smart factory, in
which, cyber-physical production system (CPPS) plays the critical role. However, most of the manufacturing industries in Taiwan
which, cyber-physical production system (CPPS) plays the critical role. However, most of the manufacturing industries in Taiwan
still heavily rely on the excel-based production planning and scheduling approach although ERP systems are widely used today.
still heavily rely on the excel-based production planning and scheduling approach although ERP systems are widely used today.
Besides, few small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) have implemented the advanced planning and scheduling
Besides, few small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) have implemented the advanced planning and scheduling
(APS) system due to the high implementation cost for satisfying the specific production characteristics and planning constraints.
(APS) system due to the high implementation cost for satisfying the specific production characteristics and planning constraints.
On the contrary, the cloud-based information system is conducive to practice smart manufacturing for SMEs, it does not require
On the contrary, the cloud-based information system is conducive to practice smart manufacturing for SMEs, it does not require
high-end devices to have high-speed computing ability, as long as they are in the network environment.
high-end devices to have high-speed computing ability, as long as they are in the network environment.
Therefore, this research considered the characteristics of manufacturing process, automation and digitalization of automotive parts
Therefore, this research considered the characteristics of manufacturing process, automation and digitalization of automotive parts
manufacturing industry to develop a cloud-based advanced planning and scheduling (CAPS) system which is implemented in the
manufacturing industry to develop a cloud-based advanced planning and scheduling (CAPS) system which is implemented in the
Amazon Web Service (AWSTM) platform. The planning engine of CAPS is an intelligent dynamic planning & scheduling (IDPS)
Amazon Web Service (AWSTM) platform. The planning engine of CAPS is an intelligent dynamic planning & scheduling (IDPS)
simulation system, which can dynamically and effectively generate production and operations schedule. Production planners only
simulation system, which can dynamically and effectively generate production and operations schedule. Production planners only
need to maintain and upload the planning data to CAPS system and download the timely operations schedule and visualized analysis
need to maintain and upload the planning data to CAPS system and download the timely operations schedule and visualized analysis
generated from CAPS’s web page. Applications of CAPS in a well-known automotive parts manufacturing company in Taiwan
generated from CAPS’s web page. Applications of CAPS in a well-known automotive parts manufacturing company in Taiwan
has been demonstrated in this paper.
has been demonstrated in this paper.
© 2019
© 2019 TheThe Authors.
Authors, Published
Published by Elsevier B.V.
by Elsevier B.V.
© 2019
This The
is an Authors,
open accessPublished by Elsevier
article under B.V.
the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Peer review under the responsibility of the scientific committee of the Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing 2019
Peer review under
Peer-review underresponsibility
the responsibility
of theof the scientific
scientific committee
committee of the Flexible
of the Flexible Automation
Automation and Intelligent
and Intelligent Manufacturing
Manufacturing 2019 (FAIM2019
2019)
Keywords: Industry 4.0; Cloud-based System; Advanced Planning and Scheduling
Keywords: Industry 4.0; Cloud-based System; Advanced Planning and Scheduling

2351-9789 © 2019 The Authors, Published by Elsevier B.V.

2351-9789 © 2019 The Authors, Published by Elsevier B.V.
Peer review under the responsibility of the scientific committee of the Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing 2019
Peer review under the responsibility of the scientific committee of the Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing 2019

2351-9789 © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing 2019 (FAIM 2019)
10.1016/j.promfg.2020.01.133
 Jen-Li Liu et al. / Procedia Manufacturing 38 (2019) 1532–1539 1533
2 Author name / Procedia Manufacturing 00 (2019) 000–000

1. Introduction

Due to the increasing dynamics of markets and the complexity in planning manufacturing processes, there is a
critical requirement to adapt existing solutions. In Taiwan, most of the manufacturing industries (e.g., metal
manufacturing, automotive part assembly etc.) still heavily rely on the excel-based production planning and scheduling
with ERP systems. Few small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) have implemented the advanced
planning and scheduling (APS) systems due to the high implementation cost for satisfying the specific production
characteristics and planning constraints.
APS systems are either add-ons or direct integral components of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems
[1]. It can solve the problem from finite-capacity scheduling at the shop floor level to constraint-based planning [2].
The systems were established to predict the future production schedule by exact mathematical optimization techniques
and heuristics. However, APS systems lacked of a part of flexibility such as the control strategies for sequencing are
permanently defined. The current APS systems cannot provide the optimal configuration of the control strategy based
on the current situation [3]. In addition, a solution of the possible combinations of control strategies regarding the
dependencies of individual jobs and machines is too complex for humans.
The cyber-physical production system (CPPS) integrates computational and physical capabilities to interact with
humans through many new modalities [4]. It has the characteristics of distributed control, real time communication,
computation and modularized. CPPS can directly receive physical data and use all the available data by connecting
through digital networks. However, most of the metal processing and automotive parts industries in central Taiwan
are SMEs which lack of the solid foundation for developing smart manufacturing [5]. Most of these SMEs are semi-
automation relying on PLC to control the shop floor production without the CPPS import experience. The degree of
automation limits the IoT development of single machine or the whole fab and is hard to achieve the goal of smart
manufacturing. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a new smart manufacturing model for adapting the scale of SMEs
in Taiwan.
In the past, enterprises often invested high capital in many physical devices and servers. The pressure not only
comes from the high capital investment but also the time and manpower to install and maintain the operating systems
and software services. Cloud manufacturing is an advanced manufacturing model for all types of end-users under the
support of cloud computing, the IoT, virtualization, and service-oriented technologies [6[7]. Bittencourt et al. (2018)
reviewed the scheduling literature from a cloud computing perspective [8], such as the cloud manufacturing multi-task
scheduling model [9]. The characteristics of cloud manufacturing is to connect production resources to the cloud and
virtualize them, thus the cost of manpower and equipment can be shifted on to cloud suppliers to save the operating
costs. Enterprise pays for the requirement of actual operation instead of high investment [10]. The cloud-based system
is conducive to practice smart manufacturing for SMEs in Taiwan [11] and cloud-based automatic virtual metrology
system for semiconductor industry [12]. It does not require high-end devices to have high-speed computing ability, as
long as they are in the network environment. Therefore, this paper aims to develop a cloud-based advanced planning
and scheduling (CAPS) system, the planning engine is based on an intelligent dynamic planning & scheduling (IDPS)
system [13], which can dynamically generate the effective production and operations schedule, and provide the timely
visualized analysis data for production planners in SMEs.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the framework, function modules of the proposed
CAPS system. The modeling procedure of employing CAPS for manufacturing system is also described. Section 3
will illustrate the application of CAPS model in an automotive parts manufacturing company. Finally, conclusions are
presented.

2. Cloud-based Advanced Planning and Scheduling (CAPS) system

2.1. The Proposed System Framework

The cloud-based advanced planning and scheduling (CAPS) system based on the intelligent dynamic planning &
scheduling (IDPS) is composed of five major modules: (1) industry case template, (2) user interface (UI), (3) input
basic data, (4) cloud-based simulation planning, and (5) output. Fig. 1 depicts the system framework and function
1534 Jen-Li Liu et al. / Procedia Manufacturing 38 (2019) 1532–1539
Author name / Procedia Manufacturing 00 (2019) 000–000 3

modules of CAPS system in which many different types of APS industry case templates will be stored in the cloud
storage for users’ training. UI module provides the web page and interactive interface for a number of users such as
sales, production planners, shop floor managers and high-level managers. Input basic data module is composed of
data files and logic files. The previous one consists of the material related data and machine related data (e.g., machine
group types, machine available time, runtime, recipe, scheduled PM); the latter one consists of the timely update data
from MES and ERP, such as shop floor production status (WIP), customer orders, inventory and purchasing status.
Cloud-based simulation planning module is composed of simulation engine, simulation rule controller (e.g., lot-select-
machine and machine-select-lot dispatching rules), and simulation parameter controller. Based on the WIP and
released lots, simulation module dispatches lots, machines, and trigger events and records the performance of lots and
machine production status. Users such as production planners set planning and control parameters (e.g., available
time, scheduled PM) and activate simulation module to generate accountable production/operations schedule which
usually fully utilizes available capacity to satisfy a weekly/monthly demand plan. Finally, two types of outputs are
stored in the data base, including production output performance (e.g., daily sum, cycle time, run sheet, WIP by flow,
move by flow) and analysis result (e.g., key machine tools, AT fluctuation impact, scheduled PM). All the production
output information are routinely exported to external databases through predefined application programming interface
(API). Analysis results are stored and manipulated in SQL, then analyze and graphically represent using Excel For
the detailed description of the system framework and function modules, data model, message passing among classes,
and the system operation process of capacity planning and capacity impact analysis modules, readers may refer to
[13].

Fig. 1. The framework of cloud-based advanced planning & scheduling system

In order to maintain a highly reliable cloud-based advanced planning and scheduling system, we need to implement
CAPS in a stable and reliable commercial cloud platform. According to 2016 report of magic quadrant for cloud
infrastructure as a service, Amazon Web Services (AWSTM) was ranked as the leader quadrant of great vision and
high execution capability. Therefore, the proposed cloud-based APS is implemented in AWS cloud service platform
which is illustrated in Fig. 2. The operation of CAPS starts from the enterprise user trigger the system. Users can
connect to the websites through different terminals by EBS and authenticate users by IAM ROLE. Different users are
authorized different functions. API Gateway is the data transmission bridge of the front-end user and back-end
processing. It connects to the executing function of LAMBDA and the scheduling function of IDPS. After processing,
it returns the results to the executing function of LAMBDA and stores in RDS. The user can output the schedule report
(result file) and sample file to the local end and temporary storage by S3.
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Fig. 2. The CAPS system implemented in AWS platform

2.2. The CAPS Modeling Process

The modeling procedure of employing CAPS system for a manufacturing system, depicted in Fig. 3. mainly
consists of four parts: (1) product setting, (2) resource setting, (3) initialization, and (4) parameter setting.
1 Product setting: all the product related data needs to be set and stored in data base.
(a) Item: all the products of a company need to be set.
(b) Routing/alternate routing: set up production routings for each item set in (a).
(c) BOM: product bill of material for each item set in (a).
(d) Material/substitute material: main and substitute materials setting based on the BOM set in (c).
(e) Lot merge/split: production lot merge or split constraint/logic for each route set in (b).
(f) Process time: standard process time for the route of each product set in (b).
2 Resource setting: all the resources required to produce a product needed to be set and stored in data base.
(a) Factory model: the area, location and number of each factory.
(b) Machine/machine group: classification of all machines located in the factory identified in (a).
(c) Buffer/warehouse: the number and location of all the buffers, product warehouses in the factory.
(d) Staff/mold/fixture: the number and types of staffs, molds and fixtures used in the factory.
(e) Process time: the process time of each part at different machines accompanied with different staffs, and
molds.
3 Initialization: initial condition for starting simulation.
(a) Material/work-in-process (WIP): initial condition of material at warehouse and WIP at shop floor.
(b) Production resource: machine status such as recipe, operation parameters, and PM schedule need to be
recorded.
(c) Customer order/work order: the timely order information from ERP.
4 Parameter setting: users need to set the parameters for starting each APS simulation.
(a) Simulation time: simulation start time and finish time.
Scheduling parameters: a number of parameters, such as dispatching logic, data collection rules, machine
breakdown rules need to be set.
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Fig. 3. The modeling procedure of CAPS system

3. Application of CAPS in automotive parts manufacturing industry

Automotive parts manufacturing industry is technology and capital intensive. More than thirty thousand
automotive parts are required for assembling a car. The complex supply chain of car manufacturing includes steel,
plastic, rubber, glass, machinery, motors and electronics industry. This study illustrated a manufacturing process of
voltage regulator which is an automobile electronics for automatically maintaining a constant voltage level. The case
company has implemented commercial APS-MP and APS-CP systems in the past two years. As the APS-CP system
is failed to consider the production characteristics and constraints of the important processes in the electronic parts
industry, the company cannot plan for profitable and feasible production and cause the long OTD time, low utilization
rate of the machine and small amount of WIP.
Fig. 4 shows the major manufacturing process of voltage regulator. The processes are separated into two phases.
Five stages are in phase one. The first stage is thick film printed circuit board (PCB) coating. The layers on substrate
of thick film printed circuit board decide the type of conformal coating. After uniform coating, the second stage is
sending the substrates into the oven. Different products have its bakeout heat and time, then natural cooling to room
temperature. The third stage is sintering. In sintering stage, the solid mass of material is compacted and formed to
protect the circuit firmness on substrate. The three stages above repeat to stack the layers of a circuit board. The fourth
stage is laser cutting. The resistor is setting for the laser beam cutting. The fifth stage is inspection. After inspection,
a part of WIP is packing and shipping to lower stream customer, and the other part is storing or becoming the parts of
other automobile. In phase two, the first part is surface-mount devices (SMD) process. The SMD process is composed
of a number of automatic machines which will perform solder paste printing, pick and place, furnacing, and AOI (auto
optical inspection) operations. The processes of last part are hybrid from manual and automatic manufacturing. The
manual manufacturing contains leads welding, cooling fin bonding, assembly and waterproof glue filling. How to
effectively generate the operations schedule to achieve the goal of low cost and short cycle time is always a challenge
for production planners.
To validate the applicability of CAPS, two best-selling voltage regulators, MFVR05900 and MFVR05970, are
selected in this case company. Fig. 5 shows the process and processing time of the two products. There are 8 orders
in December 2018. The sales order numbers are S010363, S010972, T000013, T000119, S010091, S010152,
S010092, and T000044 (see Fig. 6). This study verified the entire scheduling method and the capacity utilization to
reduce the costs and shorten the production cycle and equipment idle time.
 Jen-Li Liu et al. / Procedia Manufacturing 38 (2019) 1532–1539 1537
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Fig. 4. The major manufacturing process and the machines in an automotive parts manufacturing industry

Fig. 5. The Production process and processing time of MFVR05900 and MFVR05970

Fig. 6. The sales order of MFVR05900 and MFVR05970

This study addressed the CAPS system based on an IDPS to the SMD process of the voltage regulator. The UI
module provided the web page of the multi-user cross-platform system. The input basic data module consists of three
types of data (i.e., table template, scheduling, and basic data) required by CAPS are first exported from ERP, MES
and excel-based scheduling table. OracleTM ERP system provides the manufacturing order, material related data and
machine related data (e.g., BOM, routing, machine groups, machine available time, runtime, recipe, scheduled PM).
MES provides the timely shop floor production status and WIP information, scheduling table consists of production
constraints, dispatching rules and control parameters frequently applied in IDPS scheduling engine. The scheduling
1538 Jen-Li Liu et al. / Procedia Manufacturing 38 (2019) 1532–1539
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engine of IDPS will generate a timely and effective production and operations schedule (see Fig. 7). And then,
Quicksight will present visual planning and analysis results to users on the dashboard (see Fig. 8). Cloud-based
simulation planning module generates accountable production/operations schedule which usually fully utilizes
available capacity to satisfy a weekly/monthly demand plan. In addition, users can control parameters through the web
page. Through the dynamic model simulation, researcher can compare the previous SMD process with different
scheduling methods in different scenarios and analyze the factors to enhance the machine capacity, reduce costs and
shorten the cycle time. Table. 1 shows the real case of the scheduling results by the current method and CAPS. All the
completion dates are earlier than the expected due date by CAPS.

Fig. 7. The planned operations schedule

Fig. 8. The dashboard of visual planning and analysis results

Table 1. The scheduling results by CAPS

Order code Shipping of date Current expected completion date CAPS completion date
S010363 2018/12/22 2018/12/24 2018/12/18 09:44
S010972 2018/12/19 2018/12/23 2018/12/13 11:04
T000013 2018/12/17 2018/12/12 2018/12/14 19:13
T000119 2019/1/10 2019/1/11 2019/1/8 10:48
S010091 2019/1/9 2019/1/5 2019/1/7 15:57
S010152 2019/1/2 2019/1/1 2018/12/31 14:07
S010092 2018/12/25 2018/12/20 2018/12/24 09:16
T000044 2018/12/25 2018/12/26 2018/12/21 14:09
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4. Conclusion

Due to the difficulty for SMEs to implement an advanced planning and scheduling (APS) systems which is very
important for achieving the goal of smart manufacturing, this paper develops a CAPS system. The planning engine of
CAPS based on an IDPS System, which can dynamically and effectively generate production and operations schedule.
Applications of CAPS in an automotive part assembly company has been demonstrated to show the effectiveness for
SMEs to implement an advanced planning system in terms of high planning quality and low implementation and
maintenance cost.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Minister of Science & Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C., for support under
contract NSC 108-2221-E-029-008-MY3.

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