A distributed decision support system for operational units application to a manufacturing unit

Nowadays, a lot of machines are able to execute complex processes in the manufacturing units. Other machines can execute complex treatments for medical units. The main constraint to use these machines is the good scheduling of the tasks of preparation and the preventive maintenance tasks which are required. These tasks are manual or semi-automated tasks but they need operators. When several machines are grouped in a unit, it is important to well organize the environmental tasks for getting the effectiveness of the entire unit. In order to increase the effectiveness of this kind of units, we studied a Decision Support System (DSS) for the unit's operators. The objective of this system is to communicate with each operator category in order to give him the list of next executable actions. This DSS will not control the production facilities; it will not define very elaborate strategies for management: he will be based on decisions taken by the operators. The paper discusses about the architecture of the DSS. We identified an hybrid architecture with generic subsystems to manage different types of resources. The DSS has a distributed architecture which can use a distributed environment (Object based or MOM middleware). The objective of the distributed environment is to simplify the applications and to insure the independence of the DSS from the communication network. The case study is taken in the domain of the manufacturing: the diesel engines for trucks are manufactured on three assembly lines and the studied unit performs the test of the engines coming from the lines. The case study illustrates the use of the generic part of DSS (subsystems) and that of the Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) system for insuring the communications between the distributed parts of the DSS.