Zur Ausdrucksstärke der Stammdaten des Advanced Planning and Scheduling

Abstract

Expressiveness is applied to evaluate languages or descriptions. By expressiveness we mean what can be said within the limitations of some language. Assessing expressiveness is always based on a reference, namely the set of all things sayable, the things said in another language or the things that must be said to meet a certain purpose. So far, only nominal or ordinal measures of expressiveness have been proposed.In the approach presented here, a certain purpose serves as reference to evaluate expressiveness by a cardinal measure. The approach is derived from measuring similarity between binary vectors and employs results concerning the formal semantics of logical descriptions. By applying this approach to measure the expressiveness of the master data used by Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) systems on the one hand and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems on the other hand it can be shown that in most cases the master data of APS systems do not possess higher expressiveness than the master data of ERP systems.