Production planning in reconfigurable enterprises and reconfigurable production systems

Abstract

Reconfigurable enterprises and reconfigurable production systems represent nowadays one of the key responses towards the organisational and manufacturing needs arising in the new era known as mass customization. The paper proposes an Agent Based approach for the production planning activities in reconfigurable enterprises, characterized by complex, articulated and geographically distributed production capacities contended by many product families and composed by reconfigurable production systems that allow quick adjustment of production capacity and functionality consenting to manufacture different products of the same part family.