Frepple 0.3.0

Frepple is a Free Production Planning Library.
Plenty of planning tools are available for various production problems, different subprocess, different solver techniques.... A bit suprising, no proper solutions exist in the open source domain. Users often are left with expensive and inflexible tools and resort to spreadsheets to meet their needs.
This project aims at building an open source lightweight framework that easily and quickly delivers a solution for production planning problems. The initial focus is on small to medium sized master planning problems for the discrete manufacturing industry.
For the developer community, the project is also trying to establish a common ground framework for planning applications. Rather than building the basic building blocks (e.g. item, buffer, bill of material, ...) from scratch over and over again, developers can leverage a proven framework to extend with their own extension modules.
Main features:
- Modeling and solving framework for discrete manufacturing environments.
Key modeling constructs are:
- Item
- Buffer
- Resource
- Operation
- Demand
See here for a short domain model (requires Acrobat Reader).
A complete class diagram and API reference are available to developers.
- Heuristic, "MRP-like" solving algorithm respecting capacity, material and leadtime constraints.
- XML-based data input and output.
- Extensible and customizable architecture.
New modeling constructs and solving algorithms can be developed in C++ and loaded as a plugin module.
- The browser-based user interface and underlying database schema are based on the powerful Django framework.
Both can very easily be extended and customized.
- Embeds Python as scripting language.
Allows for flexible and easy integration and customization.
- Frepple comes as a library developed in C++.
It has no graphical user interface as such and requires to be deployed in a application.
Different applications are envisioned:
- Standalone application for use at the command line
- Microsoft Excel frontend
- Accessable from programming languages such as java, python, perl or visual basic
- Can be linked into your own C or C++ application
- Apache module for browser based user interface and network based access
- Supported on 32-bit linux and Windows environments, with Linux being the primary development platform.
Porting to other platforms is discussed under the developer section of the documentation.
- Licenced under the GNU lesser general public license.
Learn here how this license protects my and your work.
- To finish, a pretty bold statement
Frepple will be the worlds first true open source advanced planning system.
Enhancements:
- A major update in the user interface: all-in-one installation of the user interface, Python, Web server, and database.
- Big performance improvements in the user interface.
- Support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite databases.
- The forecast module has been greatly improved, and allows for forecast distribution and netting of orders against forecast.
- There are important bugfixes.