Schedule revision in a distributed job shop with the makespan objective

This paper examines the problem of schedule revision in a distributed job shop where the object is to minimize the global makespan. Schedules of work cells may interact through precedence constraints, and a work cell´s response to a local schedule disruption may affect schedules of other cells. Complete knowledge about how local schedule changes affect the global schedule may require global knowledge about the schedule. Here, we show that knowledge of only local constraints may be almost as useful as global knowledge for the revision of one cell´s schedule. We present simulation results from a general distributed job shop model