Operations Assistant.

The Operations Assistant (OA) is an on-line, interactive environment designed to help the user with the management of a manufacturing facility. It provides information on the current state of the facility and products, along with projections on the future states of the facility and progress of products. It provides a friendly view of data and the necessary information to make decisions on a product entry sequence, work-in-process reduction schemes, labor/machine/shift assignments, machine maintenance schedules, and capacity/utilization issues. OA presently contains a number of modules which have the capability of suggesting decisions, and these can be exchanged or supplemented for a particular application. The OA project began with an extensive study that was conducted in 1Q88 to ask what shop floor execution aids will be needed in the coming years. The early prototype is an outcome of this effort, influenced by the view that to guide future information system development, it is necessary to quickly prototype and trial new tools on the shop floor. The present OA prototype provides two graphical views: the product view and the process view. The operating strategy of the line can be modified interactively, and the results of the change seen immediately on these views. The user can also ask for suggestions in making operating decisions, in which case one of several optimization or heuristic algorithms is invoked. OA is highly modular and not specific to any one algorithm - other resource management algorithms can be easily added.