Patent ID: 7532945

Claim:
A method for monitoring the use of resources and materials in a manufacturing sequence, comprising the steps of: storing data representing said manufacturing sequence in a data structure; organizing said data in said data structure as one or more orders representing one or more materials being consumed and/or created in said manufacturing sequence; linking said orders so that the order that consumes a material follows the order that creates the respective material in said manufacturing sequence; linking, for each of said orders, one or more activities representing materials being processed by manufacturing resources; linking said activities chronologically within each order, said link between activities further comprising data representing temporal constraints between said activities and temporal constraints between activities in different orders in said manufacturing sequence; providing a link from one or more of said activities for one or more orders to a data that identifies a corresponding resource; and determining based on a start time for a first of the orders whether a specific resource is in use at any given time during said manufacturing sequence.