AGENT-BASED PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT

Due to the requirements of one-of-a-kind production, a separate, all-e mbracing concept for shipbuilding was evolved. In this concept, the ha rmonisation of production and its activities with respect to time and content is given priority. Customer orders are handled as projects and the simultaneous production processes, their activities and the resou rce requirements are harmonised with multi-projects in mind. Consideri ng the involved software-systems concurrent manufacturing demands a mo vement from centralised towards increasingly decentralised models of c ontrol and action. Our goal is to support decentralised planning entit ies, each of them equipped with a GIGROS-system. A central challenge i s the co-ordination and synchronization of activities within those com plex systems. To improve the system according to today's most modern p roduction paradigms, it is being redesigned towards a multi-agent syst em architecture. Introducing concepts of distributed artificial intell igence, a co-operation of the modules or of several systems can be ach ieved to yield solutions for the simultaneous, co-operative and decent ralised scheduling and resource planning. After a short description of the special requirements of the one-of-a-kind production the paper wi ll introduce the features of the graphical interactive rough planning system (GIGROS) focusing on the multi-agent approach. (C) 1998 Publish ed by Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.