An agent-based dynamic scheduling approach for flexible manufacturing systems

The paper presents a dynamic scheduling approach for flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). The scheduling approach is implemented based on the negotiation and collaboration between agents in a multi-agent system (MAS) which represents the FMS. Through the collaboration between the agents in the MAS, the system exhibits the behavior that response to the disruption caused by dynamic events arise randomly in FMS such as jobs arrive over time and machines breakdown in real time and globally. The scheduling and controlling process is done on-line, without interrupting the system´s operation and without user intervention. An experiment is conducted to evaluate the efficiency of the scheduling strategies exhibited by the proposed agent-based scheduling approach. The results demonstrate the superiority of the suggested scheduling approach as well as its capacity to cope with a fast changing environment.