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Industry 4.0, a part of the German high tech strategy, prefers self-organization in production over central production planning for the sake of greater flexibility, faster response to disruptions and to deviations, and less effort. Current planning systems usually plan centrally. We developed a universal self-organizing production and empirically compared its performance to a centrally planned production. Compared to most other approaches, the self-organizing production does not just schedule already existing operations, but starts with material requirements, explodes the bills of materials, creates production orders, and schedules backwards. The self-organizing production is based upon agents. For better comprehensibility, we additionally implemented central planning. The results of self-organization in production are promising in relation to central planning; especially when disruptions and deviations occur. Furthermore, the results suggest as best solution a combination of rough central planning and self-organization.

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