Heterarchical Production Planning and Control Architectures in the Context of Industry 4.0

Hierarchical production planning and control (PPC) comes to its’ limits when facing production structures with small lot-sizes and varied product structures. Thus, a newfound focus on heterarchical PPC, i.e., a mixture of centralised and decentralised planning, is found in research. However, past research is often neglected within this field. Hence, this thesis focuses on integrating various research streams, making the body of knowledge in this topic area available to practitioners and researchers alike.

To support in the selection and implementation of heterarchical PPC architectures, this thesis covers topics ranging from assessing, whether the employment of a heterarchical PPC architecture is beneficial for an enterprise, over the selection of a specific heterarchical PPC architecture, towards the implementation and customisation of the chosen architecture. Following the design science research framework, various research methodologies are used, ranging from structured literature research and expert interviews over machine learning towards adaptations of enterprise architecture standards. The overall approach is finally evaluated through three case studies.