Suitability of Self-Organization for Different Types of Production

Abstract

Production tends to become decentralized to provide more flexibility and robustness. Hence planning and control is also shifting to decentralized solutions to cope with a changing product mix. We present an intensive simulation study of different types of production and analyze the influence of product structure, product complexity and multiple use of materials. We show for which type of production self-organizing planning and control performs best. For this, we give a brief introduction to our self-organizing production and outline how we generate a wide variety of production master data that are freely customizable in terms of their statistical parameters, like product complexity, multiple use of materials and degree of organization, to reflect different types of productions. The results of our simulation study show the advantages of our self-organizing production.