Operational Research (OR) models usually deal with uncertain, changing requirements. This leads to a continuous process of adapting and reworking the mathematical code. However, there are scarce mechanisms to control its quality. This is essential to Software Engineering (SE), as it enforces the use of Unit Testing: automatically running tests after any alterations, to assess specific parts of the code. This is done to discover where and how errors are happening, simplifying its correction while evaluating their possible ramifications. This article aims to define how these concepts can be adapted to them, how tests should be used to detect faults and to provide a workflow to use them while developing an OR model. It provides guidelines on what should be tested and what to expect of possible errors and a process to use it.

Advanced Planning Systems (APS) have become an important tool for manufacturing and production companies that require a specific system to optimize production, logistic, material and human resources, etc. with the goal of improving the economy of the companies and offer a good customer service. An APS must be integrated to the Enterprise’s System (such as an ERP), but this task usually lacks of a specific methodology to be performed and is generally made ad-hoc. With the ultimate objective to provide an approach to facilitate this integration, this work presents a characterization of the APS from a systemic point of view, using standardized Software Engineering concepts. The idea is to provide a definition and characterization of Advanced Planning Systems, by establishing the main goals of this type of system, and considering Functional Requirements, Quality Attributes and a reference model for the architecture. The selected choices are established on the base of several international standards from the Software Engineering area, such as the SEBoK (System Engineering Body of Knowledge) and the SQuaRE (Software product Quality Requirements and Evaluation) model, among others, and aim to serve as a base line for the general concept of APS.

This paper presents an intelligent agent to analyze the ERP’s (Enterprise Resource Planning) system data structure and its compliance on the ANSI/ISA-95 standard. The knowledge base of the agent is generated using the manufacturing categories information provided by mentioned standard. The approach proposes an infrastructure of a knowledge-based agent that interacts with the database of an ERP system, in order to classify the information of ERP’s database tables according to the standard. Several study cases are evaluated and the results obtained are shown in different graphs. This is a first step to improve the interoperability between an Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) system that needs to be integrated with ERP’s especially in manufacturing and production companies.