Topic B.6: Computer-aided production planning and control when considering the uncertain availability and quality of renewable resources and their by-products

While current production planning and control systems (PPS) and supply chain management (SCM) systems take uncertainty and fluctuations into account on the sales side, the problem on the procurement side has not yet been satisfactorily solved. Especially the material’s qualitative and the quantitative fluctuations, as well as the raw material’s seasonally dependent availability and the combination of these uncertainty factors, presents a new challenge for production planning. This topic investigates how PPS and SCM systems react to specific uncertainties in the industrial utilization of renewable resources and how the planning for and reaction to unforeseen events can be improved. Accordingly, the data availability, adequacy, and suitability, for example, regarding the raw-material and product quality, are compared to bills of material, inventories, and work schedules available across the corporate network to improve the basic data of the scheduling, as well as the reactive response. It is also possible to test how various planning procedure objectives (e.g., the minimization of costs and delivery reliability) of the present (procurement) situation can be adapted and flexibly changed. This also includes the possibility of an integrated planning with various procedures.

There is preliminary work in the field of Material Requirement Planning (MRP I) and Manufacturing Resources Planning (MRP II) in PPC systems (Koh et al., 2002; Koh, Saad, 2002; Koh, Saad, 2004; Koh, Gunasekaran, 2006). There are also attempts to reduce uncertainty in PPC systems by applying basic knowledge management principles (Koh, Gunasekaran, 2006). The requirement analysis and fundamental analysis are carried out by means of formal deductive and argumentative deductive analyses. Information technology’s support potential for reducing and handling uncertainties can be described by case studies and reference modeling. This method will probably only deliver results in the form of reference models of an ideal IT support of value-creating networks for renewable resources and data provision for PPC systems. Further, the applicability of the modeling should then be tested by case studies and a simulation. Data from topic A.1 and specifically from A.4, A.5 and A.6, can be utilized for this. This simulation can be done with SAP ERP.