On the advances of the Industry 4.0 Manufacturing Planning and Control system architectures

During the last decades, the Material Resource Planning system has been considered an essential management tool for facing the manufacture of complex and highly customised products. Nowadays, the recent innovations brought from the Industry 4.0 push for a strong evolution of the Manufacturing Planning and Control System (MPC) architectures, aiming to a new class of control architectures. Among these, the intermediate (i.e., the semi-heterarchical and oligarchical) ones are taking considerable interest from the manufacturing firms due to their increased flexibility degree and productivity enhancement. However, the current scientific literature is still focused on the 'hierarchical' approach of these architectures while the 'horizontal' bargaining among entities and architecture modules need to be further investigated. After a narrative literature review of MPC architecture, this paper will focus on the development of such intermediate architectures. In particular, referring to a semi-heterarchical MPC architecture, this work extends the contributes to the design of the horizontal aspect of the higher level, evaluating the possible advantages of such an application.