Supervising conflicts in production management

Abstract

In the computer integrated manufacturing field, the problem of integrating production management decisions is often viewed as nothing but a problem of data sharing between activities. To be truly ‘computer integrated’ a production management system must be able to coordinate these decisions and to take in charge the conflicts arising between the decisionmaking systems of a production management system. In this paper, we propose an architecture in which the decision coordination and decision synchronization task (also called supervision task) is viewed as a software layer (called a local-controller) over each decision-making system. We derive the knowledge needed by each local-controller, first to detect conflicts between the decision-making systems or with the state of the production system, second the knowledge needed to solve these conflicts. Each local-controller is placed into two relation networks through which its cooperative behaviour can be predefined. Moreover, we defined a data structure allowing description of the concessions the decision-making systems are ready to make in order to help conflict solving. Each local-controller is a knowledge-based reactive system, using a blackboard mechanism and able to dialogue with other local-controllers. General behaviour models for any local-controller are defined, particularly cooperative behaviour of local-controllers with each other. A local-controller shell has been developed from which all local-controllers are instantiated.