Generation of Multi-factory Production Plans: Enabling Collaborative Lot-size-one Production

It is getting increasingly difficult for factories to provide the required flexibility to support lot-size-one production orders. Therefore, collaboration is especially important for manufacturing companies to ensure that they do not lose manufacturing contracts because they can only partially fulfill the requirements of their customers. This paper presents an approach for generating production plans across multiple factories, so that the production requirements for a given product can be met through collaboration with other factories. We describe two variants of an algorithm for computing multi-factory production plans based on constraint satisfaction. The approach makes inter-company logistics transparent to the product designer/seller - by managing the division of tasks, transportation between the factories, and resolving dependencies among the participating manufacturers in the network. We have designed an ecosystem management platform that will consider the product, its required quality, quantities, delivery dates, certification, logistics requirements etc. to automatically generate diverse production offers.