Opportunistic coordination of operations in job shop production

The starting point of this article is production planning and control (PPC) in job shop production, i.e., processing units in a job shop are investigated executing different operations on part types. In this context, the problem is to allocate the single operations of production orders to processing units with respect to the underlying objectives. PPC systems, however, fail to incorporate the knowledge of production-related theory and tend to be based on relatively simple heuristics (see Steven, 1999, p. 319). This means that the inherent flexibility of a production system will largely be ignored. Existing PPC systems, thus, show a clear theoretical deficit. Given this background, the article aims at integrating production-related theory more strongly into the world of PPC, and exploiting developments in the area of distributed problem solving. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.