A comprehensive approach for managing feasible solutions in production planning by an interacting network of Zero-Suppressed Binary Decision Diagrams

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) ranges from design concepts of products to disposal. In this paper, we focus on the production planning phase in PLM, which is related to process planning and production scheduling and so on. In this study, key decisions for the creation of production plans are defined as production-planning attributes. Production-planning attributes correlate complexly in production-planning problems. Traditionally, the production-planning problem splits sub-problems based on experiences, because of the complexity. In addition, the orders in which to solve each sub-problem are determined by priorities between sub-problems. However, such approaches make solution space over-restricted and make it difficult to find a better solution. We have proposed a representation of combinations of alternatives in production-planning attributes by using Zero-Suppressed Binary Decision Diagrams. The ZDD represents only feasible combinations of alternatives that satisfy constraints in the production planning. Moreover, we have developed a solution search method that solves production-planning problems with ZDDs. In this paper, we propose an approach for managing solution candidates by ZDDs' network for addressing larger production-planning problems. The network can be created by linkages of ZDDs that express constraints in individual sub-problems and between sub-problems. The benefit of this approach is that it represents solution space, satisfying whole constraints in the production planning. This case study shows that the validity of the proposed approach.