Manufacturing enterprise automation was focused on factory level where scheduling is a key issue in the past. As more and more companies are relying on their business parmers or suppliers, the coordination of activities through the chain of suppliers becomes critical to quickly respond to changing market conditions. The rapid growth of the information technology is now opening up a unique opportunity for companies to coordinate with their customers and suppliers to further improve their responsiveness. Effective approaches for coordination, however, have to be developed to grab the opportunity. In this paper, existing approaches" for scheduling and coordination are summarized, important issues for coordination such as architecture, solution concept, and scalability are discussed, and a price-based approach is presentedfor supply chain coordination. In the approach, each organization makes its own decision based on the prices associated with inter-organization constraints, and the...
Haoxun Chen, Peter B. Luh