Autonomic Approach to Planning and Scheduling in Networked Small Factories

The paper considers the complex behavior of a small company in a business ecosystem, time by time leader or supplier or both in one or more supply chains, and points out the data exchange and processing problems it must face for reacting fast to customer requests. Then the paper suggests that in order to meet these requirements it is convenient to provide every company with proper automatic functions, covering its distributed planning, resource scheduling and exception handling needs, whose policies can be fully customised by the company itself to mirror its specific intentions: in short, a practical implementation of the autonomic model.