Collaborative order management in distributed manufacturing

The construction of a decision assistant tool for order management is outlined. Given a factory, which has a certain capacity to satisfy a certain number of orders, the objective is to assign each order to a specific period, thus maximizing the level of customers' satisfaction. The optimization algorithm supports the sales department and forms an interface between customers' needs and the production system. By combining advances in information technology and optimization technology, a method is presented based on collaborative planning techniques that optimizes customer satisfaction as well as resource utilization. For this purpose, an algorithm was developed based on an integer program model. The tool was implemented using the Java programming environment and Cplex optimization software. The proposed model takes the form of an agent, evolving within a multi-agent system. The proposed algorithm is compared with the greedy heuristic used by the world-class motorcoach manufacturer for which this research was conducted. Computational results show that the agent-based method proposed outperformed a heuristic method currently used in industry.