Production Planning Game – Reface

The technical reface of the production planning game, which is originally developed by the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, is the goal of the European project semester. The game is used in a 1-3 day workshop (Game based learning) for students or companies to learn different planning methods and investigate the influence their planning parameters. This enables the participants of the workshop to find new ways of reducing stock, shortening lead time, optimising capacity utilisation and increasing delivery reliability – in other words the improvement of those factors that make a considerable contribution to the success or failure of an enterprise.

In the Summer Semester an EPS-group developed the game using http technologies to do the communication between the server the frontend and the tablets. The http-technologies leads to latency in website and the tablets which make it hard to play.

The project aim is to use another communication technology, i.e. Socket.IO which should solve the latency problems of the previous game set up.

The server and the app are connected via Socket.IO and Laravel Passport. The authentication happens over an API call with a password using Passport. Everything gets handled by Laravel and there shouldn’t be anything to touch there.

Socket.IO controls the reset of the communication between the app and the server. We are using ‘emit’ and ‘on’ states with the socket to trigger the events. The aspects we want to improve are the production control modules, the server and the check in units. In order to do that, we need tablets for each of the control modules and NFC tags for the check in units.