Building holarchies for concurrent manufacturing planning and control in EtoPlan

The increasing versatility in order characteristics calls for planning and control systems that are able to evolve in time. Traditional hierarchical s ystems are usually based on a function-oriented static control structure in which all orders and products are handled similarly. Due to the dynamicall y changing characteristics of manufacturing environments these static contr ol structures are not suitable anymore. Hence, a concept description and a prototype implementation for concurrent manufacturing planning and control (EtoPlan) based on multiple and temporary hierarchies (holarchies) are pres ented. The alternative control structure allows among other things to bridg e the gap between process planning and production planning. The EtoPlan ord er planning method explicitly models the uncertainty in the information due to incompleteness of process planning information and shop floor randomnes s. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.