Experiences with a control architecture for the virtual factory

Virtual factories consisting of geographically dispersed independent production facilities are already a reality in the global economy. Production facilities concentrate on core technologies and create partner networks for the manufacturing of their products, a trend initially visible in semiconductor manufacturing but fast spreading to other industries. Experiences with a control architecture, with room for human inputs, for this type of manufacturing joint ventures is presented in the paper. The work started in the extended semiconductor enterprise environment however the generic approach of the architecture opens opportunities for application in other discrete manufacturing industries. Included is comparison of results obtained using dynamic dispatching heuristics, capacitated time bucket based techniques and the control architecture to optimize a virtual factory environment