An autonomic mobile agent-based system for distributed job shop scheduling

This paper presents an autonomic mobile agent-based system for distributed job shop scheduling. The system matches the autonomic system reference architecture proposed by the IBM and has the IBM-defined fundamental self-managing properties so that it can manage itself with little human intervention. The system conforms to the IEEE FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) standard. The interoperability between the system´s agents and other agents from many active heterogeneous FIPA compliant agent platforms can be ensured. The system supports the execution of C/C++ mobile agent codes. Thus, it is applicable to a variety of applications, especially for distributed mechatronic and embedded systems. An overall architecture of the system and some implementation details about the agency and agents in the system are presented in this article. An energy saving job shop scheduling example is used to validate the self-configuration property of the system.