Distributed Production Planning through Multiple Agent System

Global competition and rapidly changing customer requirements afe forcing manufacturing enterprises to assume new production styles and configurations. Today, the agility has to concem not just operations and technology aspects but also organization: in this framework the concept of virtual organisation seems to be a new emerging paradigm to improve manufacturing firm competitiveness. Several researches bave acknowledged the use of Multiple Agent Systems (MAS) as a very promising technology far Virtual Organization developments. This paper faces the multi-facility production planning problem within the Virtual Organization concept and proposes three kind of coordination policies among plants based on the MAS concept. In arder to provide the decision maker with a tool far test the proposed coordination policies a simulation environment has been developed by using the SW ARM programming package.