ABSTRACT
Global competition and rapidly changing customer requirements are forcing major changes in the production styles and configuration of manufacturing organizations. Increasingly, traditional centralized and sequential manufacturing planning, scheduling, and control mechanisms are being found to be insufficiently flexible to respond to changing production styles and highly dynamic variations in product requirements. In these traditional hierarchical organizations, manufacturing resources are grouped into semipermanent, tightly coupled subgroups, with a centralized software supervisor processing information sequentially. Besides plan fragility and increased response overheads, this may result in much of the system being shut down by a single point of failure. Conventional-knowledge engineering approaches with largescale or very-large-scale knowledge bases become inadequate in this highly distributed environment.
