Multi-tier and multi-site collaborative production: Illustrated by a case example of TFT-LCD manufacturing

To seek collaboration with other partner enterprises becomes an inevitable strategy in today’s highly dynamic and complex business. Production planning over a collaborative network relies on resolving three challenges: (1) different objectives and autonomy of partner enterprises, (2) communication and coordination among the enterprises, and (3) planning over multiple tier enterprises and multiple local plants (sites) inside an enterprise.To resolve the challenges, this paper proposes a distributed production planning system for a multi-tier and multi-site production system by combining agent technology with advanced planning and scheduling (APS) system. Two types of agents are designed: one for each tier enterprise (tier agent) and the other for each local plant (site agent) inside a tier enterprise. While a tier agent is responsible for finding a suitable plan for the demand orders by transmitting messages through designated protocols with its downstream and upstream tier agents, a site agent is designed for detailed production schedules for its local plant by interacting with its tier agent and its APS system. This paper has developed various protocols to integrate the partner tier and site agents to construct a distributed collaborative production system.This paper takes TFT-LCD manufacturing as an illuminative example to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed multi-tier and multi-site collaborative production. The results show the feasibility of synthesizing multiple production plans over multiple enterprises and multiple production sites. Within the planning system, each company maintains their autonomy of production decision. Besides, the supply network is reconfigurable because the participated companies only need to comply with the protocols without changing their local legacy production planning systems.