Decision coordination in production management

In the CIM (Computer Integrated Manufacturing) field the problem of integrating Production Management decisions is often viewed as nothing but a problem of Data Sharing between activities. But the coordination of decisions must take into account the management of conflicts between them. We propose an architecture in which the coordination and synchronization task (also called supervision task) of the decisions is viewed as a software layer (called a Local-Controller) over each decision maker system. Each Local-Controller is a knowledge-based reactive system which uses a blackboard mechanism and which is able to dialogue with the other Local-controllers. General behaviour models for any Local-controller have been defined, particularly cooperative behaviour of Local-controllers with each other. A Local-controller shell has been developed from which all Local-controllers are instantiated.