Wichelen – IWT, the Flemish agency for “Innovation by Science and Technology”, has decided to support the development of an innovative “planning & scheduling” software solution of De Clercq Solutions.

The innovative project was named ALDISS or “Adaptive Lean Decentralized Interactive Self-steering System” in full. The software system’s uniqueness lies in the fact that it will support the different “planning & scheduling” scenarios of a variety of industries such as food & beverage, discrete manufacturing, etc. The software solution will also be an “intelligent” system that can be configured to interpret and respond autonomously to changing situations on the work floor (for example machines that become defective).

The goal is to also make this advanced “planning & scheduling” solution available to companies with a limited IT infrastructure or limited automatic data registration.

This new solution will be released as an extension of the existing Objective MES (“Manufacturing Execution System”) of De Clercq Solutions by 2012.

The project will be realised with the help of two research partners: the university college KaHo Sint-Lieven, department Industrial Engineer, section Information Technology, from Ghent and the department “Advanced Manufacturing” of Sirris, the collective centre of the Belgian technological industry at Heverlee.

For the ALDISS project, an investment will be made of 450.000 euros, 45% of which will be financed by IWT because of the obvious innovative goal.