Decision support systems in production planning and control

Production planning and control is facing more and more challenging tasks every day. Products are becoming more complex, manual systems are being replaced with complex machines. The world is undergoing a technology revolution and knowledge systems are becoming more dominant then ever before. It seems that the information age will create sophisticated systems requiring complex decisions based on the knowledge of manufacturing and other aspects of organizations. Moreover, traditional manufacturing environments are converging into knowledge-based manufacturing in knowledgeable societies. This obviously indicates the importance of decision support systems which can be developed in such a way that they can utilise knowledge and handle knowledge sources as effectively as possible. The manufacturing industry of the twenty-first century will be characterised by intensive knowledgebased systems of concurrent engineering based on digitalisation, computer network, artificial intelligence, etc. In the coming years, knowledge, agility, intelligence and rapid response are essential requirements for manufacturing systems to favour high quality products, small batch sizes, customer requirements, and environmental consciousness. Taking this into account, the 4th Intelligent Manufacturing Systems Symposium involved a series of papers discussing the decision support which could be created by intelligent systems. Academia and industrial practitioners came together and exchanged their knowledge and experiences with intelligent support systems. The Symposium covered a wide range of manufacturing topics including designing new products, automated storage and retrieval systems, competitive manufacturing strategies and manufacturing knowledge management. The Symposium was a successful event which yielded a series of valuable research publications and discussions. After the discussions, and recommendations by the session chairmen, several papers were nominated to be published in Production Planning & Control. After an extensive review process the papers published in this issue were selected. The papers present results of the studies from improvement through decision making in design to strategic enterprise resource management, from supplier selection to multi agent based simulation and from multi channel scheduling to web-based product development processes. The Symposium will continue biannually to generate a knowledge exchange atmosphere concerning the emergence of new and current technologies creating value for the manufacturing society.