Web-services-based e-Collaborative Framework to Provide Production Control with Effective Outsourcing

This chapter presents a conceptual framework of a web-services-based e-collaborative system to establish a real-time information-sharing platform for enabling collaboration among similar types of manufacturing firms. The main idea of this chapter is to integrate the process planning and scheduling activities with the proposed system considering outsourcing as a viable technique of enhancing machine utilization and system’s performance. A mathematical model has been formulated that minimizes the broad objectives of machining cost and makespan. A multi-agent system constituting different functional and non-functional entities is considered to establish the collaboration among associated firms. A real-time information- sharing scenario has been proposed that monitors the existing shopfloor activities and accordingly generates the optimal or near-optimal process plan and schedule of job orders. In order to validate the robustness of the proposed system, extensive computational experiments are conducted over small and large problems. Results obtained are compared with each other and useful insights are drawn to establish the effectiveness of the same. Further, an illustrative example has been considered that demonstrate the working mechanism of the proposed framework.