Coordination policies to support decision making in distributed production planning

Distributed production networks are considered organizational structures able to match agility and efficiency necessary to compete in the global market. Performances of such organization structures heavily depend on the ability of the network actors of coordinating their activities. The research proposes to model and design coordination problems within production network by using the Multiple Agent Technology. In particular, the paper proposes new strategies for coordinating production-planning activities within production networks. Such models have been developed and tested by using a proper simulation environment developed by using open source code and architecture. The results of the research can be located at two levels: (a) concerning the specific coordination problem addressed, the research provides some insights to make decisions about the choice of coordination approaches to be used in distributed production planning problems; (b) at more strategic level, the paper shows how Agent Technology and discrete event simulation can be used to build up efficient coordination structures for production networks.