Reconfigurable enterprises and reconfigurable production systems represent nowadays one of the key responses towards the organisational and manufacturing needs arising in the new era known as mass customization. The paper proposes an Agent Based approach for the production planning activities in reconfigurable enterprises, characterized by complex, articulated and geographically distributed production capacities contended by many product families and composed by reconfigurable production systems that allow quick adjustment of production capacity and functionality consenting to manufacture different products of the same part family.
Mass
customization consequences, such
as
shorter
product
life
cycles
and
low-cost
variety, have brought
critical pressures
to improve production
efficiency,
re-
sponsiveness
to
market changes,
and
substantial
cost
reduction.
Scientific
papers,
as
well as
Government
and
Industry
expectations, seem to acknowledge that the
challenge keyword
is
"reconfiguration"
[I].
Specifically,
two major industrial responses
to
mass
customization
can
be
acknowledged: Reconfigurable Manufacturing
and Reconfigurable Enterprise (RE). From a manufactur-
ing
perspective, the most agreed response to mass
cus-
tomization is connected to the concepts
of modularity
and
reconfigurability
of
production systems. Thanks to
their
modularity
Reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS)
allow to achieve
low
cost
customization [2].
On
the
other
side,
from an organizational
point
of
view,
Reconfigurable Production Networks
or
Enterprises
are
nowadays
considered the
industrial response
to the
great
challenges conveyed
by
this new era characterized
by
the
global
market and the impressive advances
of
infor-
mation
and
communication technology [3].
Market global-
ization, indeed, has offered
to
companies
the
possibility
to split
geographically their
production
capacity;
business
opportunities
lead
companies
to
work
together
in
tempo-
rary
organizations; in the same firm, business
units
be-
have as
autonomous
profit
centres and compete each
other for
the production
capacity
allocation. In
other
words, REs
represent
production
networks
made
of dif-
ferent and
geographically
dispersed
plants
which
can
be
reconfigured in
order
to
gather
a specific
production
process
or
product
family. However, the
RE
members
need to be
properly
coordinated
to
achieve reduction
in
lead
times
and
costs,
alignment
of
interdependent
deci-
sion-making processes, and improvement in the
overall
performance
of each
member,
as well as of
the RE.
In
this context, operations management and coordination
of
RE and
RMS
are
challenging issues involving distributed
problem
solving tasks.
Specifically,
in
production
plan-
ning
and
control activities,
the concern
on internal pro-
duction
planning is replaced
by
the
complexity of external
supply
chain. Indeed,
as
soon
as
a manufacturing
unit
tries
to
achieve coordination
with
its partners, it
quickly
faces
difficulties
associated
with different operational
conventions,
locally
specific constraints, software
legacy
and properties, conflicting objectives and misaligned in-
centives. This
task
becomes even
more difficult
when
each
RE
member
or
plant consist
of
reconfigurable
pro-
duction system; indeed,
the
reconfiguration capability
makes planning
and
scheduling
processes even more
com
plex. Multi
Agent Systems (MAS) techniques
have been
largely used for
their suitability
in modelling
complex sys-
tems
involving
multiple
autonomous agents
with
internal
knowledge
and
reasoning
engines
which communicate
and
negotiate
with each other
by
exchanging messages
according to specific
negotiation
protocols [4]. The
aim of
this
paper
is to
give
an
overview
on
the new problems
associated
with
production planning
and
control
in
RE
and RMS and
to
present
how distributed
decision mak-
ing, MAS technology
and
negotiation
mechanisms
can
be
utilized
for
solving these kinds
of
problems.
This paper addresses
the
problem
of production planning
in
RE.
Starting
from a
production planning analysis con-
ducted
in
collaboration with one world leader semicon-
ductor Company,
the
authors propose
a
classification of
PP
problem
in
RE
and believe
that
successful tools for
operation management
in
RE
need to be based on
the
decentralisation of
the
decisions, where each entity in
charge of specific planning decisions makes its own de-
cision autonomously, while global planning decisions are
achieved by means of coordination and negotiation
among
them. The
paper describes
the
adoption
of
a
MAS
model where automated agents negotiate for solving
the
problem
of allocating production plants to product groups.
The
negotiation model is tested by comparing its results
with
the
ones obtained by using
a
centralized planning
approach based on
a
MIP model.
A
numerical example
has been presented and
the
results confirm
the
competi-
tive
benefits
that
negotiation could bring.
