Representatives from Hitachi, Fujitsu, and the PSLX Consortium have joined with other individual members to form a new OASIS Production Planning and Scheduling Technical Committee. The nine members proposing the PPS work will focus on "production planning and production scheduling problems in manufacturing industries. The categories of manufacturers and types of manufacturing processes are not restricted; in scope are production planning and scheduling problems relating to a master production schedule, detail production schedule, material requirement planning, capacity requirement planning, production order management, and loading and dispatching in a shop floor.

As a starting point, specifications published by PSLX Consortium will be discussed as one possible contribution to the standardization process. The PSLX Consortium specifications contain wide variety of information about planning and scheduling in manufacturing industries," including abstract models and data dictionaries. Some of these specifications are now being considered for stardization in ISO/TC184/SC5, "Architecture, Communications and Integration Frameworks, as described in SC5 Resolution 448. The OASIS TC will only deal with the XML Specification PSLX-04 which "prescribes how to represent the production planning and scheduling information by XML, and how to implement the interfaces on computers."

The initial Committee Draft TC deliverable is expected to provide outlines of target applications of production planning and scheduling problems, list appropriate business execution messages for production planning and scheduling, define rules for an application in responding the business execution messages, and present XML schemas for each business execution message.

Specifications produced by the TC will be of interest to system integrators and software vendors focusing on production planning and scheduling problems in manufacturing industries. The PPS TC's first meeting wlll be held December 18, 2003 in Tokyo. The TC Convenor and Proposed Chair is Yasuyuki Nishioka of the PSLX Consortium and Hosei University.

Summary and Background to the Production Planning and Scheduling TC

In the current manufacturing environment, shop floor management should be collaborated with enterprise management in order to stay current with the customer needs that cannot be expected and frequently changed. Considering this situation, production planning software in the enterprise level and production scheduling software in the shop floor level are required to be integrated.

The purpose of the OASIS Production Planning and Scheduling TC is to develop common object models and corresponding XML schemas for production planning and scheduling software, which can communicate with each other in order to establish collaborative planning and scheduling on intra and/or inter enterprises in manufacturing industries.

The goal of the TC is to make a simple and extensible specification for real time communications among various software applications that need information relative to production planning or production scheduling.

Using the common object models, decision support systems of production planning and scheduling in manufacturers can be implemented, reducing huge efforts of developing interfaces to other software applications that deal with dynamic information necessary for production planning and scheduling.

The common object models include business execution messages for collaborative planning and scheduling, components used for representing the business execution messages, and rules for production planning and scheduling software in responding the business execution messages.

In order to establish collaborative planning and scheduling in practice, the TC also deals with appropriate information that is managed by surrounding software applications such as customer order management, procurement, inventory control, product and process design, quality control, and so on.

In the messages used among the production planning and scheduling applications, the following information will be basic elements and used to compose the message:

1. production orders for manufacturing execution
2. production items such as final products, parts and materials
3. manufacturing resources such as machines, labors, and tools
4. operations and events that produce some items, etc.

Therefore, one of our main targets to make a specification is to define core components for this problems domain and translate them to a XML schema representation.

The other target is addressed on specifications of interfaces that an application may obtain regarding its functional requirement. In our approach, interfaces will be simply listed according the following categories:

1. getting or query information
2. setting information
3. executing an action, etc.

These interface specifications are described as web services, and reactions required in a target application are defined using business process specification languages, both of which are discussed in other OASIS TCs. [adapted from the announcement]

About the PSLX Consortium

"The objective of the PSLX Consortium is to establish an APS (Advanced Planning and Scheduling) standard for collaborative Manufacturing and support world-wide manufacturers to implement our recommending APS systems... The PSLX consortium's new standard for production planning and scheduling is to be used in the Internet environment. PSLX will provide (1) a reference architecture for APS software development; (2) communication protocols and ontology suitable for APS software applications; (3) an XML Schema for planning and scheduling problems; (4) a common terminology for planning and scheduling problems..."

PSLX technical work is summarized in the abstract for "Collaborative Agents for Production Planning and Scheduling: A Challenge to Develop a New Software System Architecture for Manufacturing Management in Japan," presented at ICPR 17 by Prof. Dr. Yasuyuki Nishioka (Department of Industrial and Systems Management, Hosei University; Vice Chairman of PSLX Consortium, Japan)

"Manufacturers directly facing to unpredictable market demand should reduce their management risks using production planning and scheduling systems on the current ICT environment. Dealing with the production planning and scheduling problems that have many company specific capabilities especially in Japanese manufacturing industry, system development has to have many customizations. It is serious problem that these customized systems cannot follow the drastic change by reforming the old business processes. In the published recommendation specifications of the PSLX consortium, which has more than forty members of ICT and manufacturing industries in Japan, new software system architecture of production planning and scheduling problems is proposed. Since the proposed system allows different software packages perform independently, it can dynamically reform according to the market diversity. A XML based interface specification of PSLX is one of the keys to establish the communication among these autonomous subsystems. The recommendation also defines a domain object model that contains generic objects and relations in the planning and scheduling domain. If the domain object model is defined as a source of each company specific data schema, interoperability of the different systems will be established. The XML schema recommended by PSLX consortium is also one instance of the model. This generic model of PSLX will also contribute to the research community in this area as a bridge between academics and practitioners. In this talk, after brief introduction of the recommendation specification of PSLX, a next generation production management on collaborative agents for production planning and scheduling (CAPPS) is proposed. The CAPPS architecture has functional agents each of which has PSLX interface to communicate planning and scheduling information. The talk also shows some examples of common interface developed in several commercial based scheduling packages in Japan. Finally, the impact of CAPPS to manufacturing management and the importance of standardization of the domain model and its interface protocols are discussed..." [abtract from the August 2003 presentation at Blacksburg, VA, USA]

PSLX References:

• PSLX Consortium web site [English]
• About PSLX
• PSLX FAQ document
• PSLX members
• Draft PSLX Specifications. PSLX Technical specifications in Japanese were approved in June 2003. English translations are being made available:
  • PSLX Engineering Specification: Guidance. PSLX-00. 21 pages. [source .DOC]
  • PSLX Engineering Specification: Grand Design for Manufacturing Enterprises. PSLX-01. 67 pages. [source .DOC]
  • PSLX Engineering Specification: APS Agent Model. PSLX-02. 95 pages. [source .DOC]
  • PSLX Engineering Specification: PSLX Domain Objects. PSLX-03. 100 pages. Definitions are based upon the APICS dictionary. [source .DOC]
  • PSLX Engineering Specification: XML Specification. PSLX-04. 215 pages. [source .DOC]
  • PSLX Common Dictionary. PSLX-05. In preparation
• "Collaborative Agents for Production Planning and Scheduling: A Challenge to Develop a New Software System Architecture for Manufacturing Management in Japan." By Yasuyuki Nishioka. Plenary presentation given at 17th International Conference on Production Research (ICPR 17), August 3-7, 2003, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. Conference on "Enterprise Integration: A Production Perspective." See the abstract (also printed above). [source PDF]
• "Collaboration on Planning and Scheduling." By Prof. Dr. Yasuyuki Nishioka, Hosei University and PSLX Consortium Japan . Presented at ISO/IEC TC184/SC5 Plenary. April 4, 2003, Cheju. [source .PPT, cache]