Adaptive Planning Concepts using Emerging Flexible Manufacturing Simulation Methods

Flexible manufacturing is a relatively new concept in manufacturing where the plant is given many different types of products in very small lot sizes to manufacture. This type of highly flexible manufacturing plant is dynamically changing at a must faster pace than traditional manufacturing plants. As such new highly adaptive planning algorithms have been studied in the attempt to utilize the full flexible capabilities of these systems. Many military applications require the same type of adaptive planning that is used in flexible manufacturing. This paper explores the parallelism between adaptive planning in manufacturing and in military applications. It specifically looks at a new technique that gives rise to multi-resolutional decision-making. This technique allows for decisions to be made at all levels of the control hierarchy, with different amounts of resolution using the same set of models. It represents a big savings in the effort of creating the models and maintaining them up to date with the current information. The paper shows how this concept can be used in several military applications. As a decision support system it can analyze or even suggest different courses of actions (COA). Given the models of the different military units and the different options available to the commander this system can suggest the best COA. If the models are maintained up to date with the latest situational information it can respond quickly to plan a new COA.