Multi-agent-Based Negotiation Approach for Scheduling Jobs on Parallel Machines with Ready Times and Machine Preference

The manufacturing processes of aluminum foil often included seven main steps and the electro-etching is critical step which usually has many parallel machines with three distinct voltage equipments. Therefore, the production scheduling is parallel-machine and its choices of eligibility. In this paper, an agent-based architecture is proposed to develop a parallel-machine scheduling application for this manufacturing environment. There are three types of agents in the proposed system. Each job/machine is viewed as a agent, named job/machine agent. To establish job allocations, job agents and machine agents have to bid interactively. Management agent plays as a system supervisor and coordinator to manage negotiation processes between job agents and machine agents to ensure the global objectives such as minimizing total jobs´ tardiness and flow time, balancing machines´ loading, and maximizing total revenue can be achieved. Eventually, experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The result shows that the proposed architecture provides a parallel eligible machines scheduling solutions with a better performance.