Characteristics of distributed autonomous production control

Four types of intelligence, self-knowing, action-planning, target-setting and scope-limiting are essential for the production progress of distributed autonomous production. The fundamental controlling features that differentiate distributed autonomous production control (DIST) and centralized production control (CENT) are the local/global view and concurrent/sequential processing, respectively, in controlling operations. The ability of production control is characterized by response time, planning scope and progressive accuracy. The characteristics of DIST are short response time, narrow planning scope and high progressive accuracy. The experiment of job shop simulation shows that DIST can meet the due time without any capacity planning in advance, and that the real-time response that DIST can realize is essential to achieve short lead-time production. However, in heavy workload production circumstances, the lead-time of CENT is smaller than DIST, because CENT, which has a wide planning scope as a characteristic, can control a lot of work in process at any one time. As the result, CENT can realize higher production efficiency. On the other hand, when the estimated processing time is not reliable, the lead-time of DIST is smaller than CENT, because DIST can sensitively correspond to the difference between the planned and the actual processing time.