Simulation of a Hybrid Product-Driven System for Manufacturing Planning and Control*

Manufacturing planning and control systems (MPCS) incorporate processes that consider several levels of product aggregation and different time horizons for decision making. The decisions rendered on each level do not always have similar objectives. In the context of intelligent manufacturing systems (IMS), the coordination of decisions on different levels is a fundamental problem. Extensive research on IMS, specifically regarding coordination among decision levels in product-driven control systems (PDCS), is nonexistent. Therefore, simulations of the planning and control processes are proposed to analyze the coordination of multilevel objectives. The proposed implementation simulates the coordination between tactical and operational levels. At the tactical level, production plans are obtained through a system based on advanced planning and scheduling (APS). At the operational level, a decentralized system, which is based on distributed decision rules, is implemented. The simulation considers decentralized decisions that are managed by production lots, which are modeled as holons, and based on an industrial study case. The results indicate that coordination is feasible and highlight the importance of the reactivity caused by the distributed decisions made by the active lots. The proposed simulation schema can also be used to compare conventional and holonic collaborative approaches.