AN INFORMATION-SYSTEMS BASED PARADIGM FOR DECISIONS IN RAPIDLY CHANGING INDUSTRIES

The hierarchical production planning (HPP) paradigm that is used to co ntrol production in many industries has been developed and refined dur ing the past century. In this paper, the basic concepts underlying the KPP Paradigm will be briefly reviewed and an enhanced paradigm introd uced for rapidly changing industries. The proposed enhancements view t he decision making as a dynamic information system in which the role o f information is dramatically different from the traditional approache s. The enhancements are at three levels: structural topology of the de cision layers, adaptive framework for the internal structure of an enh anced layer, and a special class of heuristics for managing capacity w hen faced by change.