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Blackboard Agents for Mixed Initiative Management of Integrated Process-Planning/Production-Scheduling Solutions Across the Supply Chain
journal contribution
posted on 01.01.1998, 00:00 by David W. Hildum, Norman Sadeh, Thomas J. Laliberty, John McA'Nulty, Stephen Smith, Dag KjenstadAs companies increasingly customize their products, move towards
smaller lot production and experiment with more flexible
customer/supplier arrangements, they increasingly require
the ability to respond quickly, accurately and competitively
to customer requests for bids on new products and efficiently
work out supplier/subcontractor arrangements for these new
products. This in turn requires the ability to rapidly convert
standard-based product specifications into process plans and
quickly integrate new orders with their process plans into existing
production schedules across the supply chain. This paper
describes IP3S, a blackboard-based agent for supporting integrated
process planning/production scheduling across the supply
chain. IP3S agents support concurrent development and
dynamic revision of integrated process-planning/productionscheduling
solutions across the supply chain, maintenance of
multiple problem instances and solutions across the supply
chain, flexible user-oriented decision making, declarative representation
of control information, the use of a common representation
for exchanging information, coordination with other
planning/scheduling agents and information sources, and ease
of integration with legacy systems. The IP3S agent has been
customized for and validated in the context of a large and
highly dynamicmachine shop at Raytheon’s Andover manufacturing
facility. Empirical results show an average performance
improvement of 23% in solution quality over a decoupled
approach to building process-planning/production-scheduling
solutions.