Title: A closed-loop feedback simulation for RFID-based manufacturing planning and control system

Authors: Li-Chih Wang; Chen-Yang Cheng; Shih-Lun Hsu

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering and Enterprise Information, Tunghai University, Box 985, Taichung 40704, Taiwan ' Department of Industrial Engineering and Enterprise Information, Tunghai University, Box 985, Taichung 40704, Taiwan ' Department of Industrial Engineering and Enterprise Information, Tunghai University, Box 985, Taichung 40704, Taiwan

Abstract: Nowadays, the performance of customer service level in manufacturing industries highly depends on an effective manufacturing planning and control system (MPCS). An agent-based manufacturing planning and control system (AMPCS) allows negotiation-based decision-making to achieve the global objective. With the advantage of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, agents in AMPCS may effectively control and identify the production progress of all raw materials, work-in-progress (WIP), and products across the entire manufacturing supply chain. However, the production schedule may become inefficient or even infeasible due to uncertainties, such as machine breakdowns, processing time delays, rush order, quality problems, and unavailable material. Therefore, this research proposes a closed-loop feedback simulation (CLFS) approach based on RFID-enabled real-time manufacturing information for scheduling and rescheduling in an agent-based manufacturing system in response to the dynamically changing manufacturing activities and exceptions. From the simulation experiment, the scheduling results proposed by RFID-based MPCS combined with CLFS performed much better than the results obtained from previous researches.

Keywords: radio frequency identification; RFID; production planning; production control; multi-agent systems; MAS; agent-based systems; system modelling; closed-loop feedback simulation; manufacturing planning; manufacturing control; negotiation based decision making; scheduling; rescheduling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJITM.2013.051634

International Journal of Information Technology and Management, 2013 Vol.12 No.1/2, pp.106 - 128

Received: 03 Mar 2011
Accepted: 24 Nov 2011

Published online: 19 Dec 2013 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article