Adaptive process planning.

The success of companies with job shop production strongly depends on their production flexibility. This is often significantly influenced by the process planning and production control. Aiming at maximizing production flexibility, this paper presents an approach to further integration of process planning and production control by combining and optimizing already existing planning methods. Essentially, in a rough planning stage, all process chains which are technological relevant to the manufacturing of a given product are taken into consideration. Applying a dynamic multi-criteria evaluation to all process chains ensures that the most appropriate, situation-specific process chain is chosen for production. This is done based on pre-established production targets, which facilitates a flexible response to incidents and other unplanned production events. The structure and functionalities of the presented approach are thoroughly explained in this paper and its feasibility is demonstrated with an example.