Real-Time Promising for Authority Domains Operating in a Build-to-Order Mode Scalable enterprise systems are designed to support collaboration and rapid decision making in response to exogenous stimuli.  We posit that the ability to make tight yet achievable promises in response to requests from consumers or other businesses is a fundamental capability of intra-enterprise and inter-enterprise business automation.  Therefore, this research investigates techniques for real-time promising by discrete build-to-order environments with dynamic order arrivals.  Results of the research are directly applicable to the increasing number of manufacturers that sell built-to-order products direct to customers via the Internet and to a future where collaborative commerce freely occurs among dynamically recombinant business partners.

A vast literature exists on scheduling to meet specified due dates.  There exists, to a large extent, a misconception that the problem of setting due dates has basically been solved.  However, very little effective research has been done on due date setting, or promising, which is perhaps the most important operational level decision.  This is the focus of this research project.  The existing techniques for due date promising that are scalable consider order characteristics only in an aggregated fashion.  However, in discrete build-to-order environments the variance of flow time across all orders is quite large, and algorithms are needed that can appreciate individual order characteristics on a detailed level when computing due dates.

This research project develops algorithms for real-time due date promising that consider current time-phased availability of resources and material, existing commitments, and the current system state.  Various alternates (resources, paths, raw materials, sources, and sub-components) create combinatorial complexity.  To increase performance, a combination of both optimal algorithms with good scalability such as shortest path and computational heuristics are considered.  One of the heuristics to be examined is based on a novel, even controversial, idea: for the purposes of promising, the time when a resource will be able to process an operation can be estimated with sufficient accuracy by considering only a partially ordered task plan.

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