Semi-heterarchical production planning structures in the support of team-based manufacturing

Manufacturing enterprises are facing fierce competition within the modern global market, resulting in a requirement for continuous improvement of their production management practices. In this context, a number of manufacturing paradigms such as team-based manufacturing have been adopted to provide the flexibility, agility and responsiveness required to cope with the volatility of production demands. The introduction of team-based working practices necessitates a clear definition and delegation of responsibilities to various teams and often requires significant changes in production planning and control procedures. The successful implementation of such a distributed production approach is then dependent on the way that the production teams manage their internal activities and cooperate with other teams to achieve overall manufacturing goals. A novel team-based distributed production planning and control approach based on a semi-heterarchical structure is presented that aims to support the autonomous and cooperative attributes of various production teams within manufacturing enterprises.