Effective relational database approach to represent bills-of-materials

Abstract

Today's production systems are under the pressure of mass customization where customer orders may result in an explosive number of product variations. Handling information related to materials and components becomes a complex issue with the increasing variability. This paper presents an effective approach to handle product information in a relational database environment for multi-product and multi-process production systems. The approach presented in this paper aims to reduce the efforts when defining products to the production systems for the purpose of generating bills-of-materials (BOMs) and executing material requirements planning (MRP). Two algorithms are presented in this paper. The first algorithm is to retrieve information from the relational database environment to generate the BOMs. The second algorithm calculates the material requirements for all products in a customer order list. Examples are chosen from textiles since complications related to the MRP issues are at a greater extent in this branch of the industry. © 2005 Taylor & Francis Ltd.