Abstract for: Dynamics of Autonomous Control in Production Logistics

Due to increasing market dynamics, Production Planning and Control (PPC) has become more challenging for manufacturing companies. Production plans have to adapt quickly to changing market demands. It is often stated that (1) conventional PPC methods cannot satisfyingly handle unpredictable events, disturbances and market dynamics and that (2) in practice the complexity of centralised architectures tends to grow rapidly with size, resulting in deterioration of fault tolerance, and flexibility. To manage the increasing dynamics inside and outside a production system, autonomous control (AC) of shop floor logistics is a promising approach. The paper gives an overview of the modelling and analysis of AC strategies for production logistics. A universal shop floor model, built with Vensim DSS, is introduced. AC strategies are discussed and implemented. The particularities of modelling a production logistic scenario are presented. Based on the simulation results the logistics performance as well as the influence on the system’s behaviour is assessed. The main focus lies on the comparison of the effects of the different autonomous control strategies on the logistics performance of the system and its behaviour. To achieve this goal, sensitivity analysis is used to compare the robustness of the logistic system while interchanging the AC strategies.