Implementation of Capacity Planning Agent of Demand Responsive Planning Framework : Master’s Thesis in Production Engineering of The Royal Institute of Technology

Abstract: This master’s thesis is conducted as a conclusion of Master degree of Science in Production Engineering and Management at The Royal Institute of Technology. The focus of this thesis work is to implement a Capacity planning agent. Nowadays, companies need to adapt themselves to be as responsive to customers’ demand as possible. However, the responsiveness is usually limited by the fixed capacity of the production. Evolvable Production System (EPS), motivated by the limitation mentioned above, enables more flexibility in adjusting the capacity of production system with its reconfiguration ability. With EPS, modules can be dynamically added or removed from the system fostering a stepwise investment. Demand Responsive Planning (DRP) is a planning framework that utilizes the reconfigurability of EPS. With DRP, capacity planning of a production system is done after the demand from customer is realized. This new concept is called “Invest to order”. In order to see how capacity planning of DRP performs in different circumstances, this thesis attempts to implement the Capacity Planning Agent (CPA) with the main responsibility of dynamic evaluating, planning and adjusting the capital of production system according to customer demand. After the implementation of CPA is finished, in order to test the performance of CPA, the Customer Demand Simulation Agent (CDSA) is also implemented. Several tests with satisfactory results are achieved which have proved the validity of CPA to some extent.