Production Scheduling in an Agile Agent-Based Production Grid

To meet the requirements of modern production, where short time to market, production driven by customer requirements and low cost small quantity production are important issues, we have been developing an agent-based software infrastructure for agile industrial production. This production is done on special devices called equip lets. A grid of these equip lets connected by a fast network is capable of producing a variety of different products in parallel. The multi-agent-based software infrastructure is responsible for the agile manufacturing. An important aspect of this software is the scheduling of the production. This paper describes a multi-agent-based solution for this problem. In our production system requests for products arrive at random times and every product must be completed before its deadline.