Co-operative production planning for small- and medium-sized enterprises

Minimising manufacturing cost and production time parallel to raising the q uality and the shipment reliability are important challenges in every produ ction system. In case of distributed production systems the management of t he above-mentioned criteria has great significance and needs a complex, co- operative handling of the problems. A new, co-operative manufacturing netwo rk model is proposed for co-ordinating the production of Small- and Medium- sized Enterprises (SMEs), based on the holonic paradigm. The paper introduc es the main modules of the model succinctly and describes an application un der realisation in Hungary, in an agricultural SME network, pointing its ec onomic benefits as well. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved .