Real-time, cooperative enterprises for customised mass production

Abstract

The paper discusses the main requirements that are posed by customised mass production towards managing production networks. Special emphasis is put on real-time, cooperative behaviour. We present a large-scale national industry-academia R&D project aimed at improving the performance of a production network that produces consumer goods in large quantities and variability. An integrated approach is outlined for planning and scheduling the behaviour of the system at network-, factory- and plant levels, as well as for adapting the various plans and schedules to real execution conditions. Novel, integrated solutions are described for rolling horizon production scheduling of a factory with more than 100 production lines, for real-time control of daily production supported by information fusion and simulation, as well as for cooperative component supply. The industrial deployment of the integrated systems is also presented together with some lessons of their routine application.

Keywords:

• production network
• coordination
• scheduling
• monitoring and control

Acknowledgements

The work was supported by the NKFP Grant No. 2/010/2004 (VITAL), the OTKA Grants No. T049481, T73376, and by the EU-projects AC/DC IST 031520 and Collplexity 12781(NEST). Tamás Kis gratefully acknowledges the support of János Bolyai research grant, no. BO/00380/05.