PRODUCTION PLANNING AND CONTROL HIERARCHY USING A GENERIC CONTROLLER

An enhanced decision-making and control hierarchy is introduced for th e production planning problem. The proposed decomposition schema first combines the principles of both a temporal decomposition and a produc t disaggregation to define the production planning hierarchy. The conc ept of a generic controller is then applied to two levels of hierarchi cal decision making. To further provide for enhanced decision making a nd control, both the frequency and the content of coordinative informa tion exchanges among the hierarchical levels have been significantly a ugmented. An integrated, stochastic decision-making approach will be e mployed within each implemented generic controller to rigorously addre ss the uncertainties that are inherent to the production planning prob lem. The proposed two-level application of the generic controller is t hen expanded to outline the interactions among additional planning lev els as well as other functions comprising a computer-integrated manufa cturing system. Finally, methods are proposed for determining the esse ntial planning horizon lengths that are required for each production-p lanning level to interact with other manufacturing functions.