Decentralized production planning and design of a production management system based on an object-oriented architecture

Today’s production planning and control systems are based on a centralized planning concept and architecture resulting in a limited ability to adapt to organizational structure and procedures. A twofold object-oriented approach is undertaken for the redesign of production planning and control. To increase the flexibility and adaptability of such systems, this paper first outlines a concept of decentralized production planning and control. This is based on a distribution of production and operations management tasks to interacting autonomous organizational units, structuring manufacturing in an object-oriented manner. The essential feature of each unit is the integration of planning, realization and control tasks, planning being based on time frames. Second, it is shown how the concept can be realized by means of an object-oriented information systems development. A generic information system is designed for the general properties of an organizational unit. Taking advantage of object-oriented technology (e.g. inheritance, reuseability), it serves as a reference and builidng block for the design of local information systems each supporting an individual organizational unit. The generic information system is customized to the required features of a specific organizational unit according to the level of planning and the organizational structure of the domain. The overall system is set up by a network of such customized local information systems.