Achieving Cost Competitiveness with an Agent-Based Integrated Process Planning and Production Scheduling System

As globalisation takes place, the market is getting more and more competitive. Manufacturing enterprises are facing tremendous pressure to succeed in the market with promising market shares. This has led to enterprises seeking for competitive advantage in order to vie with their rivals. In manufacturing context, efforts have been put in, for instance, to reduce production lead times, maximise productivity and optimise resource utilisation. These efforts aim to reduce all types of costs incurred, as a means to achieve cost competitiveness. There is also a challenge for the manufacturers to be competent to efficiently and cost-effectively cope with dynamic changes of customer demands in the market. These demands are related to a wide range of product mixes with short product lifespan and with unpredicted demand pattern (Zhang, 2011).