A Model for the Dynamic Planning of Industrial Projects
Seppo Törmä · 1997
This thesis deals with the planning problem faced in industrial projects: how to create a project plan whose execution will establish the goals of the project, that is, the existence of a specified product. Industrial projects are characterized by continuously growing and changing information about their goals and constraints. In this work, project planning is seen as an ongoing process that, in the presence of the changes, dynamically maintains a plan to supply appropriate operational guidance throughout the execution of the project. There are various different planning tasks in large industrial projects and numerous formal or informal planning techniques. This thesis does not aim to provide any new planning techniques. Rather, the goal is to define a modeling framework to represent an industrial project in an information system in a way that makes it possible to automatically recognize the open planning problems in the project, and that would thus assist in the use of the specific planning techniques. This thesis develops an object-oriented model where dependencies between different properties of objects are specified with the aid of constraints. The model includes a generic mechanism to represent the objects in multiple different situations. This makes it possible to support the analysis of the differences between the current state and the goal state of a project, the differences between the knowledge of different agents and the differences between alternative courses of action. A knowledge base built using the model could support simple reasoning to recognize conflicting sets of constraints. The model describes the relationship of information objects (eg, reports, drawings, and schedules) to product objects. Moreover, it provides a generic mechanism for the representation of structural objects through their compositional structure and the interactions among their parts. In addition, it includes a representation of the activities as transformations between the states of objects. Resources are represented as entities that offer services. A service is a specification of the contracts that the resource is willing to sign. The nature of the project enterprise – the virtual enterprise of a project defined by the contractual relationships – is analyzed. Its structure is described by the control relationships between the participating agents. The dynamic influences within a planning process are analyzed. Planning is defined as decision making about future action. The constraints for the planning process are created by the properties of the command and observation processes, and the efficiency requirements posed to plans. Finally, a summary of the model is presented and its use is illustrated with an example. © All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.