Production monitoring and control with intelligent products

Abstract

Advances in production planning and control in recent decades have focused on increasing the sophistication of the planning function. For good reasons, these advances have led to the centralisation of the planning function in production. However, the sophistication of the planning function should be in balance with monitoring and control of the plan. Monitoring and control are by their nature decentralised, beginning on the shop floor, and, therefore, the desire for greater sophistication in monitoring and control leads to renewed interest in decentralised and localised approaches. This paper demonstrates the possibility of using intelligent products for decentralised monitoring and control. Intelligent products are aware of their local context and can negotiate with local manufacturing resources. As such, local solutions to problems can be proposed directly when problems occur. With the advancement of the ‘Internet of Things’, such a scenario is likely to become feasible in the near future. The paper demonstrates the viability of such an approach through a simulation study, in which robustness is included as an additional measure of performance. The results of the simulations are encouraging.