Agent-based strategic planner for the production of samll lots of complex products: theoretical and practical perspectives

This paper presents a strategic planner that assists the decision-makers to take strategic decisions on short term to respond faster and efficiently to unexpected events in the ramp-up production of complex and highly customized products, namely in situations of peak of demand, late change requests and immature technology. This tool combines the flexibility of multi-agent systems with the optimization capability of mathematical optimization solvers. The application of the strategic planner is illustrated by playing iterative what-if games supporting implementation of mitigation strategies addressing a real use case of a peak demand of a specific product.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Frame-work Programme FP7 ARUM project, under grant agreement n° 314056info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

What-if game simulation in agent-based strategic production planners

In the nowadays highly unstable manufacturing market, companies are faced, on a daily basis, with important strategic decisions, such as “does the company has the necessary capacity to accept a high volume order?” or “what measures need to be implemented if the product demand increases x% a year?”. Decision-makers, i.e. company’s managers, rely on their experience and insights supported by classical tools to take such decisions. Classical mathematical solvers or agent-based systems are typical architectural solutions to implement strategic planning tools to support decision-makers on this important task. Within the ARUM (Adaptive Production Management) project, a hybrid strategic planning tool was specified and developed, combining the optimization features of classical solvers with the flexibility and agility of agent systems. This paper briefly presents such architecture and focuses on the generation of the “what-if game” mechanism to support the generation of more intelligent and dynamic planning solutions.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007- 2013 under grant agreement n° 314056.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Integration of an agent-based strategic planner in an enterprise service bus ecosystem

The continuous change in the manufacturing world is demanding more flexible, responsive and accurate planning tools, which are able to assist the decision-makers to take tactical and strategic decisions on short notice with a high level of confidence. For this purpose, these tools should dynamically explore different operative scenarios in the planning procedure and produce information about key performance indicators. This paper describes the development of an agentbased strategic planner, combining the flexibility of multi-agent systems principles with the optimization capability of a Mixed Integral Programming technique. The tool is integrated in an ecosystem of heterogeneous decision-making systems through an Enterprise Service Bus that also provides access to legacy data.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio