Artificial intelligence in production management: A review of the current state of affairs and research trends in academia

Smart systems and artificial intelligence are playing an ever-increasing role in our daily lives. This trend does not spare industry and production, entailing the potential to gradually replace traditional management tasks. Although the numbers for AI applications in production are continuously growing, the respective publications do not appear to spend much thought on long-term implications. Based on 74 publications in 5 databases, this paper presents the results of a systematic literature review on artificial intelligence in production management over the last twenty years. The review finds that applications that have been of high interest in this regard are process planning and control as well as scheduling. Both tasks are situated in the realms of standard managerial functions and are thus prone to be accomplished by autonomous systems in the future. We suggest that there are currently no management models available to represent the growing dependence on cyber-technical systems, and researchers need to address this shortcoming to pave the way for the production management of tomorrow.