A holistic algorithm for materials requirement planning in collaborative networks

Abstract

Collaboration has increasingly been considered a key topic within the small and medium-sized enterprises, allowing dealing with the intense competitiveness of today’s globalised markets. The European H2020 Cloud Collaborative Manufacturing Networks Project proposes mechanisms to encourage collaboration among enterprises, through the computation of collaborative plans. Particularly, this paper focuses on the proposal of a holistic algorithm to deal with the automated and collaborative calculation of the Materials Requirement Plan. The proposed algorithm is validated in a collaborative network belonging to the automotive industry.