Production control framework for supply chain management – an application in the elevator manufacturing industry

The supply chain plays an essential role for modern companies to retain their competitive advantages in today's business environments. Collaboration among entities within the supply chain has a great impact on the system performance. In this paper, we propose an agent-based collaborative production framework to provide the flexibility and real-time responsiveness of a supply chain system. Orders, sub-assemblies, production lines, and cells are modelled as agents that interact with each other in a collaborative way. Only simple parameter values, instead of detailed data, are exchanged among agents in this framework. To examine the system performance, we conduct several experiments based on simulation. The results show that this framework enables the production entities to actively collaborate with each other to achieve lower-cost production. In addition, results from sensitivity analyses demonstrate its ability to cope with different levels of machine breakdowns. Finally, costs incurred to meet due dates for each individual company in the supply chain can be evenly reduced by seeking a performance balance among individual companies, thus justifying the feasibility of our proposed framework.