Convergent Technologies (CT) - Realtime Scheduling for Production Planning, Control and Monitoring

Realtime Scheduling for Production Planning, Control and Monitoring

Thomson Press, India

Problem Definition
THOMSON PRESS (TP) is one of the biggest printing presses in Asia, renowned for its quality print job and timely delivery of the products to its customers. Being a leader in the industry, TP handles hundreds of print jobs at any given time.

It has many Work Centers located at different geographic locations. The managers at TP have to keep track of all these Work Centers and numerous print jobs before they can forecast an approximate estimation for a new job, and schedule it in such a way that it doesn`t affect the existing schedule. This process is not only tedious, but also humanly impossible.

To overcome this problem and make Production planning faster and accurate, TP wanted to build a Real Time system that can assign tasks to these Work Centers in real time.

Solution Framework
Convergent Technologies has implemented Automated Scheduling system to provide optimum utilization of the available resources. While doing so, the system should also provide visual information of what is happening with different resources at any given point of time, by keeping track of it in real time. Once this is achieved, the system should also be able to schedule a new job along with the current work load and be able to provide an accurate estimation of the time its going to take to complete a job, so that the managers can provide a realistic deadline to the customers.

The system implements a proprietary scheduling algorithm, with massive amount of parallel processing and highly memory intensive operations. The system is implemented on Linux Platform, using C++, Java, XML and MySQL. The remote communication is implemented using SOAP.