Advanced Scheduling

Model advanced resource constraints, such as rules about concurrent rule usage, and advanced inter-operation constraints including limits on the time between operations and how much operation times can be extended.

Implement custom rules about how materials are consumed to ensure that sub-assemblies and raw materials are consumed according to business rules. When allocating materials, the system filters and ranks data to allow quality-related or customer-specific material usage constraints to be accounted for.

Define additional schedule optimization rules to deal with problems such as minimizing changeover times, preferred sequencing and campaigning. Composite rules can be built with the SIMATIC IT Preactor workflow tool.

Visualize the assembly process from raw materials through to finished goods and sales orders in the Material Explorer. This shows a graphical view of the material dependencies as well as plots of stock levels over time. See where shortages will occur and choose to keep them as a constraint, or ignore them.

Gives access to the full flexibility possible. Database schema and constraint model can be altered as required, including adding tables and fields. Create custom scheduling rules to solve specific scheduling problems and custom data manipulation tools for use with the workflow engine.

Allows interaction with the schedule, but changes cannot be saved. Viewers can be used in the sales office to track the progress of orders and carry out order inquiries against a read-only copy of the published schedule. Management can use them to compare actual times with scheduled completion times to assess performance of the production process. Viewers can be used on a shop floor PC to provide the cell supervisor or machine operator with up-to-the-minute work-to-lists generated by the scheduling system.