Collaborative agents for production planning and scheduling (CAPPS): a challenge to develop a new software system architecture for manufacturing management in Japan

Abstract

Considering the frequent changes in market needs, real-time production management will produce huge additional value for manufacturers. As scheduling of shop floor operations is a local and partial decision in enterprises, the distributed local scheduling problems should be integrated at the enterprise level. Since decisions at the shop floor are very valuable, the next generation of production management will be performed as a decentralized system. This paper proposes architecture for scheduling-intensive production management. In the architecture, referred to as collaborative agents for production planning and scheduling, system integration is only achieved by communication among agents, i.e. a system is composed of loose connections between agents. As an implementation method, the paper introduces a standard specification for the communications among agents. The specification is recommended by PSLX, the Japan-based consortium for production planning and scheduling. The paper also shows some emerging business models on scheduling-intensive production management.