Distributed forward checking for scheduling in flexible manufacturing cells

In flexible manufacturing cells, scheduling has to take into account multiple cells in charge of distinct manufacturing orders sharing common flexible machines, and frequent disturbances must be accounted for efficiently. That suggests a multiagent model distributing decisions between manufacturing order agents and machine agents. The solving process is achieved by alternating infinite capacity scheduling processes performed by the former and several finite capacity scheduling processes performed by the latter. The resulting chronological greedy search is shown to be robust to sudden changes and is able to tackle overconstrained problems. To make the heuristics more effective, we add negotiation processes between manufacturing order agents through forward checking techniques inspired by the constraint-based scheduling community.