The Effect of Planning Horizon on Manufacturing Control Architecture Performance

The requirement for adaptable and re-configurable systems for manufacturing has highlighted the inadequacies of traditional centralised control approaches. As a result, research in this area has focused on the decentralised approach, which involves the use of a number of interacting decision-makers in place of a single centralised one. The question of what are the appropriate control architectures for these systems has led industrial and academic researchers to develop a spectrum of decentralised control architectures ranging from hierarchical to non-hierarchical structures. While current research in this area has proven the concept of these approaches [1,2], neither extreme of the control architecture spectrum has proven to be the most appropriate choice for a given manufacturing system. Recent research into providing an objective comparison of alternative control architectures has shown that some degree of hierarchy is important for distributed manufacturing control architectures [3,4]. This paper is concerned with our current investigations into why these partial hierarchies appear to display superior performance.