Production planning and control in a virtual One-of-a-Kind Production company

Today, the manufacturing industry, particularly the OKP (One-of-a-Kind Production) industry, tends to be lean, agile and global. This tendency leads to a new concept of a virtual company that consists of several subproduction units geographically dispersed in the world as branches, joint ventures and subcontractors.

Many OKP companies, such as those in the heavy industry, e.g., a shipbuilding company, have become virtual companies. For these virtual companies, traditional production control and management systems, methods and theories do not satisfy their needs for production planning and control. This paper presents the basic concepts and methods, a reference control structure, and a reference company architecture to cope with the particular problems for production planning and control (PPC) in a virtual OKP company.

These particular problems to be discussed in this paper include: (1) modelling of evolutionary and concurrent product development and production under a continuous customer's influence; (2) real-time monitoring and control of the production progress in virtual OKP; (3) a flexible or dynamic company control structure to cope with uncertainties in the market; (4) adaptive production scheduling structure and algorithms to cope with uncertainties of production state in virtual OKP; (5) modelling of production states and control system in virtual OKP; and (6) the reference architecture for a virtual OKP company.