About the project

The overall vision is to remove the failings of existing operations planning systems in managing highly variable manufacturing environments. In such organisations the high frequency with which process and supply chain disruptions occur and changes in product design and customer demands happen, form major barriers to increasing the competitiveness and maintaining the high rate of growth of successful manufacturing businesses. The key objectives of the project are to provide a means of adding autonomous decision-making capability to the existing Finite Capacity Planning (FCP) processes of manufacturing organisations. The focus is on using such capability to enable organisations to make significantly faster, more flexible and more cost-effective responses to customers' demands, and to enable efficient management and provision of higher levels of product customisation, process innovation and delivery service. In addition, the ability of such processes to operate efficiently in complex environments will offset the adverse effects arising from the complex interactions of the frequent disruptions and changes that take place in processing, supply chain and demand processes.

A step change in the operations planning process is required and will be facilitated by the highly innovative nature of the autonomous decision-making processes that can be applied within them. These processes arose from EPSRC-funding research projects, undertaken by the academic partner, that have successfully proof-of-concept tested the application, to the operations planning process, of the basic principles of autonomous gene regulatory control, within complex biological organisms.