Co-operative production planning for small- and medium-sized enterprises

Minimising manufacturing cost and production time parallel to raising the quality and the shipment reliability are important challenges in every production system. In case of distributed production systems the management of the above-mentioned criteria has great significance and needs a complex, co-operative handling of the problems. A new, co-operative manufacturing network model is proposed for co-ordinating the production of Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), based on the holonic paradigm. The paper introduces the main modules of the model succinctly and describes an application under realisation in Hungary, in an agricultural SME network, pointing its economic benefits as well. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.