An Agent Approach for Distributed Job-Shop Scheduling

Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, 2008

The present work details the experience on designing a multiagent system devoted to a dynamic Job Shop setting using the PASSI methodology. The agent system is in charge of the planning and scheduling of jobs and their operations on a set of available machines, while considering the materials assigned to each operation. Dynamicity concerns job orders scheduling on-the-fly and the reschedule caused by changes to the original plan due to clients, machines or material stocks. The system has been modeled with the PASSI Toolkit (PTK) and implemented over the Jade agent platform.

Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, 2008

The present work details the design and implementation of a multiagent system devoted to the dynamic Job Shop Scheduling problem. The agent system tackles the planning and scheduling of jobs and their corresponding operations on a set of available machines. The system has been modeled with the PASSI agent-based software development methodology and implemented over the JADE agent platform.

IFAC Proceedings Volumes, 1995

The multi-agent paradigm is increasingly used in the analysis, modelling and design of complex s'stcms \\ilh highly interacting components. In the framework provided by the generic prototyping approach, the paper presents a solution for the behaviour modelling of discrete event processes, where the decision-making capabilities of cooperating agents have to be emphasized. At the object IC\'el the DCPN (decision control Petri nets) formalism is proposed, while the coordinating mechanism at the system level has been developed according to the blackboard paradigm. 111e job-shop case stud~' illustrates the approach. The conceptual model provided by this approach is being implemented in the MASlM (multi-agent simulator in manufacturing) module of a DSS for intelligent job-shop control.

2015

Production scheduling becomes more complex as some other function like maintenance gets coupled with it. Multi Agent Systems are considered as intelligent solution providers in such complex decision making environments. The paper presents a conceptual framework for a Multi Agent System for integrated scheduling and maintenance.

In the current global market, traditional hierarchical approaches for manufacturing scheduling and control don't produce the desired results. It occurs especially in Job-Shop manufacturing configurations. In order to overcome the limitations that hierarchical and centralized architectures show in new manufacturing systems, many decentralized schemes have been proposed. Most of those proposals are based either on dispatching rules or on market mechanisms. While dispatching rules approximations provide a good solution to manage large number of disturbances, market approaches provide efficiency. This paper presents a multiagent architecture which combines both types of ideas.

2011

Job shop scheduling is one of the strongly NP-complete combinatorial optimization problems. Developing effective search methods is always an important and valuable work. Metaheuristic methods such as genetic algorithms are widely applied to find optimal or nearoptimal solutions for the job shop scheduling problem. Parallelizing genetic algorithms is one of the best approaches that can be used to enhance the performance of these algorithms. In this paper, we propose an agent-based parallel genetic algorithm for the job shop scheduling problem. In our approach, initial population is created in an agent-based parallel way then an agent-based method is used to parallelize the genetic algorithm. Experimental results showed that the proposed approach enhances the performance.

J Intell Manuf, 2004

ATeamsÐteams of autonomous agents co-operating by sharing solutions through a common memoryÐhave been proposed as a means of solving combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper, the ATeam architecture is tested on the job-shop scheduling problem. The results show that the method can work, but that it depends on the portfolio of agents and on the way in which the memory is managed.

2005

Some recent trends in manufacturing in particular and business in general, lead to new approaches regarding the organisation and software architecture, mainly adopting distributed solutions. Such organisations imply organisational and technological evolution through agility, distribution, decentralisation, reactivity and flexibility. New organisational and technological paradigms are needed in order to reply to the modern manufacturing systems challenges. The Multi-Agent paradigm represents one of the most promising approaches to build complex, flexible, and cost-effective scheduling systems because of its distributed and dynamic nature. Modelling the Scheduling of Manufacturing Systems by means of two technologies like Meta-Heuristics and Multi-Agent Systems seems to be an interesting way to see Industrial Systems in the future. A multi-agent based model for support dynamic scheduling in manufacturing environments is proposed.

The International Journal of Advanced …, 2011

This paper studies a flexible job shop problem considering dynamic events such as stochastic job arrivals, uncertain processing times, and unexpected machine breakdowns. Also, the considered job shop problem has routing flexibility and process flexibility. A multi-agent scheduling system has been developed for solution with good quality and robustness. A pheromone-based approach is proposed for coordination among agents. The proposed multi-agent approach is compared with five dispatching rules from literature via simulation experiments to statistical analysis. The simulation experiments are performed under various experimental settings such as shop utilization level, due date tightness, breakdown level, and mean time to repair. The results show that the proposed agent-based approach performs well under all problem settings.

IEEE Systems Journal, 2012

Market-based mechanisms such as the contract net protocol (CNP) are very popular for dynamic job allocation in distributed manufacturing control and scheduling. The CNP can be deployed with different configurations of the system elements. Every configuration corresponds to a basic or a hybrid topology. The subject of topology is generally discussed in the field of "distributed systems." Inspired from the notion of topology in the distributed systems, this paper proposes a ring-like model as a competitor for the web-like CNP-based job allocation within the concept of holonic manufacturing systems. Details of the algorithm for scheduling and assignment of jobs to resources in the ring structure is presented and its performance is compared with both CNP-based distributed model, and the centralized conventional scheduling of a real manufacturing case study involving a major turbine production plant. Comparison of performance indicators such as time and cost of operations shows that the distributed models clearly outperform the conventional practice with meaningful impact on the production economy. As a possible implementation strategy, a hybrid switching model, composed of both competing models, is proposed.