Simulation-based Planning and Control of Production Fractals

In order to increase their competitiveness, companies optimize their manufacturing by adapting structures to the requirements of technology and market. On the other hand, they try to fulfil specific requirements by extreme customer orientation and manufacturing on demand. This leads to new organizational structures and manufacturing systems. Appropriate organization forms, such as the fractal company, are distinguished by high flexibility, rapid adaptability and exploitation of human potentials. However, they also require appropriate PPC-systems or rather new methods of PPC. In addition to a high planning reliability these systems have to ensure high flexibility, distributed processes of planning and decision-making, general orientation towards common goals and an information flow conform to the requirements. The most important elements of such a PPC-system are long-range analysis of the production structure, medium- and long-range planning for the entire production area, short- and me dium-range coordination among production fractals and short-range shop-control inside the fractals. At the IPA, simulation-based systems are being developed to support the planning and control of such organization forms within the production. The user is put into the position of planning job orders reliably and optimizing production, concerning cost and schedule reliability, by making use of the advantages of decentralized structures.