Interactive knowledge based shop floor control system

To meet the market requirements for more flexibility and a quicker response the order planning and control decisions have to be revised more often than in the past. MRP II systems can not follow the big number of shop floor events. Therefore an advanced shop floor control system was developed that supports supervisors in making short term production decisions using company wide and individual information and rules. Case studies proved that a large subset of rules can be delivered to any customer. The system runs on UNIX hardware using the TWAICE expert system shell and suits big and small companies. Within the internal architecture a task coordinator integrates steps of conventional Shop Floor Control (SFC), of knowledge based (KB) consultations, simulation, and user interaction.