Polite rescheduling: responding to local schedule disruptions in distributed manufacturing systems

This paper considers the problem of handling schedule disruptions in a distributed manufacturing system. When a cell controller reschedules a manufacturing cell in response to some disruption, it may disrupt the schedule at some other cell, because schedules at different cells may interact. In the approach we propose, a controller at a disrupted cell tries to reschedule in a way which is likely to be least disruptive to other cells´ schedules, through negotiation with controllers at other cells. This approach, which we call “polite rescheduling”, has the advantage of retaining much of the original schedule, while avoiding wide propagation of the disruption through the rest of the system. Simulation results show that a polite rescheduling algorithm helps isolate disruptions to a small subset of cells