Coordination strategies to support distributed production planning in production networks

The research proposed in this paper concerns three main issues of the network: architecture, coordination mechanism and the local plant decisions. The first issue is the development of a multi-agent architecture able to model the decentralised structure of the production networks. The second issue regards the coordination strategies to manage the relations among the independent manufacturing plants at the global level. The latter issue concerns the strategies used by the plant to formulate the proposal at the local level. The main objective of the research is to provide some useful information to make decisions about the choice of coordination approaches to be used in distributed production planning problems at the global and local level. The proposed approaches have been developed and tested by using a proper simulation environment. The experiments have been conducted under different conditions of workload and market price fluctuations; the results of the simulations provide the information necessary to select the suitable coordination and protocol mechanism in a distributed production-planning problem. [Received 24 November 2013; Revised 17 March 2014; Accepted 12 April 2014]