Research on production planning and control system of enterprises under virtual enterprises environment

Global competition and rapidly changing customer requirements are forcing major changes in the production styles and configuration of manufacturing organizations. Virtual enterprise is an advanced management and organization schema for enterprises to survive, develop and enlarge competition priority in unpredictable, constant and fast variable competition environment. Whereas current production planning and control system can't meet the requirements of enterprises under virtual enterprises environment, such as autonomy, distributed, dynamic, heterogeneity, interoperability, cooperation, etc, a multi-agent based distributed production planning and control system is proposed, which is constructed by adding several intelligent agents on legacy production planning and control system to meet above-all requirements. The aim of the system is to enhance the performance of enterprises under virtual enterprises to gain shorter dead line, rapid response to customers' requirements, higher accuracy of delivery, less storage, higher resources utility, less transportation costs, etc.