AN INFORMATION-SYSTEMS BASED PARADIGM FOR DECISIONS IN RAPIDLY CHANGING INDUSTRIES

The hierarchical production planning (HPP) paradigm that is used to control production in many industries has been developed and refined during the past century. In this paper, the basic concepts underlying the KPP Paradigm will be briefly reviewed and an enhanced paradigm introduced for rapidly changing industries. The proposed enhancements view the decision making as a dynamic information system in which the role of information is dramatically different from the traditional approaches. The enhancements are at three levels: structural topology of the decision layers, adaptive framework for the internal structure of an enhanced layer, and a special class of heuristics for managing capacity when faced by change.