Distributed production scheduling in an open manufacturing environment

In this epoch of global economic markets, an intense world-wide competition has impelled manufacturing industry to move toward the agile and high-effective manufacturing paradigm. All require a flexible, requirement-driven, and reconfigurable production system to adapt to this open manufacturing environment and to be subject to the requirements of the increasing reduction in product life cycle and rapid changes in market demands. The advent and development of network technology (especially Internet is more popular) and distributed computing technology provide enabling technology for the geographically dispersed manufacturing resources to be integrated and employed effectively and efficiently. And manufacturing enterprises can expand/improve their throughput within a short time through outsourcing or leasing equipments/product lines. Hence, there are some new requirements for production scheduling in this open manufacturing environment. Owing to the manufacturing environment more open and the changes in market demands more quick, the traditional centralized management and scheduling approaches which assume knowledge of all jobs and manufacturing resources are in control of a decision maker are not suitable for this open distributed manufacturing environment. And the traditional approaches that are inflexible and slowly responsive to emergencies (such as machine failure, operator absence, material shortage, and etc.) can not satisfy the needs of unforeseen dynamic situation. This paper presents a multi-agent system model, selection mechanisms for manufacturing resources and an effective negotiation technique for production scheduling. The model involves some task agents and resource agents. A solution to a production scheduling problem is the result of negotiation-based conflict resolution in the iterative and asynchronous multi-agent decision making process.