Reactive Planning and Scheduling in Clusters of Small Companies

The paper proposes a new operational environment, specifically conceived for networked small companies, supported by an advanced suite of software services and applications. The ultimate aim is enabling the intended clusters of small companies to perform distributed planning and individual scheduling activities with the purpose of making them more reactive to triggering events and possible perturbations. The proposed model and supporting functions are developed in the frame of the EU-funded FP7 SME 243554 eBEST platform, led by entrepreneurial associations from six European countries. The eBEST approach is validated by a number of pilot cases providing interesting feed-back to improve the solution.