Factory control integrated with operational planning

Describes the integration of a factory control system into a decision support environment for operational planning. This work is part of a research project which has been carried out at the Asea Brown Boveri Corporate Research Laboratory, Baden, Switzerland. The overall aim of the project is to define and evaluate methods and strategies for operational planning and control, and to integrate them in a decision-support system. The paper firstly presents the planning and control environment in which a factory control system works, followed by a description of an existing factory control system. The way in which scheduling rules and algorithms are integrated into the AZR control system is described, and then a decision support environment is described which uses a factory simulator in conjunction with a control system to evaluate methods and strategies for planning and control