| In response to the changing market requirements of today, manufacturing organizations are transforming themselves by focusing on their core business activities and by establishing new forms of partnership with their interactors. As a consequence of these trends, the network organization is gaining more importance. However, albeit this increasing transformation of the economic landscape, it seems that these trends towards the building of more agile and decentralized forms of control structures have evolved faster than the planning and control tools needed to manage them. Consequently, real life manufacturing systems are usually still controlled by centralized planning and control systems such as ERP and MRPII systems, or by decentralized kanban-like approaches.; In order to fill the lack of generic network operation systems, this thesis proposes a framework which aims at operating networked manufacturing systems by fundamentally taking advantage of new forms of agile, distributed and decentralized manufacturing organizations. In brief, this framework, called NetMan, proposes to organize and operate manufacturing systems as networks of responsible, interdependent, collaborating, and self-managed organizational centers. In these networks, decision-making is decentralized in order to empower centers to make quick and appropriate decisions in response to environmental changes and contingency situations. Next, decision-making is reintegrated within a collaborative operation system so as to support these centers during the collective execution and the coordination of their operations. Such networks are composed of manufacturing centers that are configured within a global organizational framework that sets their responsibilities, roles, goals and privileges in order to control the coherence and the performance of the entire network.; This thesis introduces many points, which include the NetMan organizational modeling, the concept of NetMan centers, the internal modeling of NetMan centers, and the relationships between these centers. It also proposes a novel operations planning and control strategy to operate such networked manufacturing systems. Finally, even though this framework proposes to decentralize decision making, it does not systematically lead to the complete decentralization of the overall control architecture. Indeed, it allows the implementation of a large range of organizational control strategies, from highly decentralized to more centralized forms of control. |
