Cooperation Mechanism for Team-Work based Multi-Agent System in Dynamic Scheduling through Meta-Heuristics

This paper describes a multi-agent scheduling system that assumes the existence of several machines agents (which are decision-making entities) distributed inside the manufacturing system that interact and cooperate with other agents in order to obtain optimal or near-optimal global performances. Agents have to manage their internal behaviors and their relationships with other agents via cooperative negotiation in accordance with business policies defined by the user manager. Some multi-agent systems (MAS) organizational aspects are considered. An original cooperation mechanism for a team-work based architecture is proposed to address dynamic scheduling using meta-heuristics.