Abstract
M.Sc.
The manufacturing sector has produced a wide variety of techniques in its
attempts to find the ultimate solution for the manufacturing process, with these
techniques ranging from material requirements planning, just-in-time production,
total-quality management, flexible manufacturing systems and computer
integrated manufacturing to advanced planning and scheduling.
Given the fact that the technique entitled "advanced planning and scheduling" in
the manufacturing environment is primarily aimed at resource planning and
scheduling during the production process, however, a clamant need was created
for manufacturing companies to broaden their focus in order to include all the
processes involved in the production environment, as well as the external
processes impacting on productivity. A large area that came into focus owing to the latter paradigm shift is known as "supply chain management". Supply chain management is concerned with the integration of and communication between the various elements in the entire supply chain, including elements such as demand planning and forecasting, scheduling, customer sales, supplier purchases, production planning and forecasting, resource planning and warehouse management.
This research study will be devoted to an investigation into the issues
surrounding supply chain management and all its manifestations, including its
basic components and their integration and interaction. This investigation will
also cover research into scheduling systems up to current reactive constraintbased
scheduling systems, since scheduling is deemed to be the core of the
supply chain in terms of the influence it exerts on most other components, be it
directly or indirectly. The investigation will also take us into the realm of an exciting new technology whose exponents are known as "intelligent software agents", which agents are aimed at providing autonomy to the objects within a system and which agents are
characterised by their behaviour and decision processes. The said agents can
be used to perform highly specialised tasks during the manufacturing process,
such as scheduling and forecasting. A prototype system will be developed in the course of the research in a bid to illustrate the integration, evaluation and monitoring of the supply chain elements through the use of intelligent agents. By endowing the system with intelligence, the researchers hope to identify many future uses for intelligent agents in the various segments of the supply chain.