Contracting resources for manufacturing tasks

This paper deals with a new architecture and negotiation protocol for the dynamic scheduling of manufacturing systems. The architecture is based on the paradigm of distributed intelligence and multi-agent systems. In what concerns the architecture, this paper has two original contributions: the existence of agents representing tasks together with agents representing resources; and the important role of the resource manager agent. A new negotiation protocol for manufacturing systems is also presented in this paper. The purpose of this protocol is to dynamically assign operations to the resources of the manufacturing system in order to accomplish the proposed tasks. This protocol involves a renegotiation phase whenever exceptions appear