Production planning and control in flexibly automated manufacturing systems: current status and future requirements

Starting from the observation that currently we lack the control policies to effectively establish and manage the operational flexibilities required by contemporary flexibly automated manufacturing systems, the paper articulates a proposition towards the development of a formal production planning and control framework for these environments. This framework essentially attempts to integrate emerging results on the representation and control of these environments through a bottom-up hierarchical modeling and analysis approach. Open research problems that will underlie such an integration effort are identified, and potential solution approaches are briefly outlined