RAPShell for RFID-enabled real-time shopfloor production planning, scheduling and execution

In typical enterprises that adopted RFID technology, different manufacturing parties are facing challenges on collaboratively making decisions such as conflicting objectives as well as gaps between high-synchronized information flow and unstandardized decision-making procedures. In order to facilitate different parties' decision-making behaviors such as planning, scheduling and execution bodies, this paper introduces an RFID-enabled real-time advanced planning and scheduling shell (RAPShell in short) to enable real-time coordinate with each other. In RAPShell, customer orders are converted into production order in planning level, then scheduled in scheduling level and finally carried out in execution level. It uses RFID technology in execution level to real-time capture the production data, which will be fed back to scheduling level for real-time rescheduling and finally to meet the constrains set in planning level. That forms a closed-loop within the entire manufacturing environment so as to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of decision-making. A case study from a real-life demonstration shows how RAPShell can help different end-users such as planners, schedulers, machine group leaders and machine operators to ease their activities.