Integrating transportation scheduling with production scheduling for FMS: An agent-based approach

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) are distinguished by their machine and routing flexibility. The existence of a large number of routing alternatives makes the integration of transportation scheduling with production (or machine) scheduling inevitable for achieving the required scheduling objectives. Conventional integration approaches lack the support for the dynamics of real FMS. In this paper, an agent-based approach for integrated scheduling under consideration of the dynamics of the FMS is proposed. Agents representing jobs and resources cooperate at different levels of abstraction to optimize the schedule from the different perspectives. The reaction to the dynamics of the environment is automated based on a disturbance handling method. In handling disturbances, efficiency and stability are taken into consideration. Based on the illustration of an application scenario, it is shown that this approach results in enhancing the resource utilization of the entire FMS as well as improving the required short-term and long-term flexibility.