The production of modern high-tech products in industrialized countries requires strong automation. In addition to the technical aspect, it is necessary to further develop production planning and control processes that take into account the capabilities of modern information processing. Lars Mönch outlines the requirements for modern production control systems for complex production systems and develops a novel framework consisting of control procedures and software agents for computational implementation. He identifies software agents to represent control functionality, develops new distributed solution heuristics for the decision units of the hierarchical levels, and examines their performance. The author designs an agent-based software architecture that corresponds to the distributed hierarchical nature of his proposal.