PRODUCTION PLANNING AND CONTROL HIERARCHY USING A GENERIC CONTROLLER

An enhanced decision-making and control hierarchy is introduced for the production planning problem. The proposed decomposition schema first combines the principles of both a temporal decomposition and a product disaggregation to define the production planning hierarchy. The concept of a generic controller is then applied to two levels of hierarchical decision making. To further provide for enhanced decision making and control, both the frequency and the content of coordinative information exchanges among the hierarchical levels have been significantly augmented. An integrated, stochastic decision-making approach will be employed within each implemented generic controller to rigorously address the uncertainties that are inherent to the production planning problem. The proposed two-level application of the generic controller is then expanded to outline the interactions among additional planning levels as well as other functions comprising a computer-integrated manufacturing system. Finally, methods are proposed for determining the essential planning horizon lengths that are required for each production-planning level to interact with other manufacturing functions.