SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase I research project is intended to develop a high quality, flexible, and adaptive planning and scheduling software prototype for extended enterprise manufacturing environments. Planning and scheduling are some of the most important functions within many production systems. In a competitive environment, effective planning and scheduling have become a necessary condition for survival in the marketplace. Failure to do so would not only mean a reduction in production effectiveness and higher costs, but also a serious erosion of the competitiveness of the entire supply chain. With recent advances in information technologies and the rapid evolution of supply chain management techniques, the need has arisen for more advanced planning and scheduling tools. These tools must be able to communicate, collaborate, and integrate their planning and scheduling functionalities to obtain optimal results throughout the enterprise. This research project will bring state-of-the-art decision and optimization methodologies to bear in meeting this need. This research development is expected to produce a significant practical impact in the area of Supply Chain Management. If successful, it will bring new planning and scheduling tools to the e-commerce business environment. Moreover, the development of the proposed prototype will be critical to the development and commercialization of an advanced planning and scheduling software tool that can be used for many industry sectors

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will build upon the successful development of the Phase I project that developed models and algorithms for planning and job scheduling systems. The software tool described in this proposal will allow organizations to schedule their operations in real-time to generate the optimal plan to maximizing their operational targets. During Phase I, the team created new planning and scheduling algorithms and successful empirical studies using recent innovative research in the areas of large-scale optimization and the newly developed methodology of Nested Partitions. In Phase II the team plan to further develop the concept to create successful implementations in several manufacturing firms. The technology to be developed in Phase II will greatly enhance the capability of the current planning and scheduling software tools. This innovation brings the state-of-the-art decision and optimization methodology to the Advanced Planning and Scheduling software market. In addition, planning systems developed with the proposed methodology will add new levels of flexibility for companies to more quickly adapt to changing material, operational, and market conditions. This SBIR project will make new planning and scheduling tools broadly accessible to virtually any manufacturing firm. The proposed scheduling and planning tools will enable them to communicate, collaborate, and integrate their planning and scheduling functionalities to obtain optimal results throughout their enterprise and their entire supply chain. It is expected that coordinated use of these tools will eventually create an integrated cyber-infrastructure for American manufacturing firms and create more efficient supply chains that will enable these firms to be more competitive in the global marketplace. Moreover, if successful, the development of this proposed tool will lead to fruitful attempts to develop and commercialize an advanced planning and scheduling software tools that can be used for many other sectors of the economy