Reference: PAID-06-10-2396
Period underway: 01/11/2010 – 01/11/2012
Type: Competitive research projects
Amount: 15,000 €
Financed by: Universitat Politècnica de València
Principal Investigator: Gómez Gasquet, Pedro
Participant: Gómez-Gasquet, Pedro; Lario Esteban, Francisco Cruz; Ortiz Bas, Ángel; Franco Pereyra, Rubén Darío; Segura Andrés, Rubén

Description:

Within a global competition framework, in which response times become increasingly relevant as a competitive element, there are many challenges that organisations have to faced. Among these, operations management, and particularly production planning, can help to improve the flexibility and robustness of production systems to a great extent.

Although Production Scheduling has been traditionally considered quite a quantitative viewpoint, this project aims to adopt an approach that comes closer to decision-making support systems. It is proposed that the operational decisions to be made in the production scheduler’s area are connected, and that a consensus is reached in this case with their decisional environment (planning, orders management, warehouses and workers) based on the restrictions that each one proposes.

This project puts forward three objectives: defining a methodology; developing models associated with new issues; designing algorithms to search for solutions.

The methodology intends to formally determine the path that must be followed to model a production scheduling problem within a hybrid flow workshop frame, such as negotiation process management, which poses using software agents to represent the different roles of the production system involved and to the search for a solution. The models will be proposals of the negotiation processes that will represent different configurations of the problem under study. Special emphasis will be placed on analysing the variants related to the production approach, which combines the «make-to-stock» and «make-to-order» in the same system, and is being adopted by some companies as a way to move forward to mass customisation. Algorithms will be used as a tool as part of the process that has been previously modelled, and should be able to be easily integrated into the designed process, or the algorithms themselves should be able to configure a negotiation process that follows the defined methodology.

This project objective is to cut the existing distance between available proposals and production companies’ requirements with the indicated features. The inclusion of quantitative negotiation procedures enables real situations to be dealt with and the solutions can adapt to requirements at all times that will, in turn, improve the performance and flexibility of production systems.