Planning and Optimising Value Chains in Production Networks of MSEs: A Lightweight Planner For Parallel Processes

Emad Aghajanzadeh, Julia Christina Markert, Matthias Kerzel, Stephanie von Riegen, Pascal Krenz, Lothar Hotz, Jens Peter Wulfsberg

Abstract: With increasingly automated production and global competition, pricing pressure on micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) from the trade sector is increasing. Cooperation with other enterprises could be part of the solution to allow them to continue providing their services in the form of made-to-order, customised products. With new challenges and changing circumstances, applying modern Information and Communication Technology and AI (Artificial Intelligence) to local production in networks could provide valuable opportunities. The construction of value chains is a complex planning problem with partial parallelism, as companies can work independently and in parallel, but are also often dependent on precursors from previous production steps. Utilising this partial parallelism is essential for finding production plans with a short duration. While heuristically guided planners can optimise for such a criterion, selecting a value chain is a multifactorial optimisation problem. Besides total production time, aspects like cost or transport can be significant. Moreover, if this choice is up to customers, they will require a quick, interactive generation of plans according to their preferences. A graph-planning-based approach for interactive multifactorial optimisation is presented. The approach is demonstrated and evaluated on examples from the production domain.