Manufacturing companies need to be effective in meeting customers’ delivery requirements. Due to customers’ expectations of shrinking delivery times, manufacturing lead times need to be short. This can be achieved through efficient Production Activity Control (PAC) methods. Currently PAC methods rely mostly on centralized decision-making and, seeming not to be adequate to deal with the increasing complexity and dynamics of manufacturing. Autonomous Production Control (APC) methods are a promising alternative to current methods, due to their rapid and flexible reaction to disturbances of the production systems’ operation. APC methods transfer the power of decision-making from a central unit to distributed logistic objects, such as machines, jobs and material handling devices. In this study, three APC methods, namely Pheromones (PHE), QLE (Queue Length Estimator) and a refined version of QLE (RQLE), are compared and analysed via simulation. The study was accomplished for two shop configurations, namely a flexible flow shop and a general flexible flow shop. Simulation results show a superior performance of RQLE in both configurations. Results also show that a new dispatching rule here proposed, the SPT-RTT rule, performs better than others with which it was compared. The study may have important implications for industrial practice and future research in PAC.

制造公司必须有效地满足客户的交货要求。由于客户期望缩短交货时间，因此需要缩短制造提前期。这可以通过有效的生产活动控制（PAC）方法来实现。当前，PAC方法主要依赖于集中决策，而且似乎不足以应对不断增加的复杂性和制造动态。自主生产控制（APC）方法是对当前方法的一种有前途的替代方法，因为它们对生产系统运行的干扰具有快速而灵活的反应。APC方法将决策权从中央单位转移到分布式物流对象，例如机器，工作和物料搬运设备。在这项研究中，通过仿真比较和分析了三种APC方法，即信息素（PHE），QLE（队列长度估计器）和QLE的改进版本（RQLE）。该研究是针对两种车间配置完成的，即柔性流水车间和通用柔性流水车间。仿真结果表明，RQLE在两种配置下均具有出色的性能。结果还表明，此处提出的新调度规则SPT-RTT规则的性能优于与之相比的其他调度规则。该研究可能对PAC中的工业实践和未来研究具有重要意义。