Technical and industrial issues of Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) systems

The basic functionality of planning and scheduling in Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) systems, especially constraint-based planning and optimization, is analyzed and discussed by use of theory and examples including how objectives, decision-variables and penalty factors are handled.The paper concludes that the planning functionality is radically improved compared to MRP and ERP, but stresses how essential it is for a good outcome that the user is familiar with the core APS functionality to enable a careful setup of the many (conflicting) planning parameters.The research presented in this paper is funded by the EU Union via the EmpoSME and ValuePole projects while the APS descriptions and tests are based on Oracle's Advanced Planning and Scheduling software.