Negotiation in distributed production planning environments

Mass customization and global competition push enterprises to adopt proper business models able to capture all the opportunities arising from emerging competition rules. An increasing number of industrial enterprises distribute their production capacity world wide to achieve lower production costs, lower distribution costs (due to the closer proximity to customers), and deeper knowledge of customer needs. As a drawback, coordination of the different production plants and the balance among plants and enterprise goals represent a critical issue in the network management. In this context the paper looks at the production planning problem, adopting a traditional hierarchical time-based perspective in the analysis of the global process and suggesting a decentralized planning approach to deal with the originated subtasks related to different time horizons. In particular, the paper suggests a production planning architecture able to highlight relationships among subtasks' variables in which mechanisms assure consistency among solutions of different planning levels. Moreover, the paper proposes negotiation frameworks as effective tools to manage production planning subtasks.