Distributed manufacturing scheduling using a novel cooperative system

The problem of manufacturing scheduling is crucial but difficult due to its computational demands. Many general-purpose meta-heuristics or multi-agent scheduling systems with social- or natural-inspired protocols for agent interacting or decision making have been widely adopted to provide optimal or suboptimal solutions. In this paper, more relevant rules are found from the known optimal solutions of a classic manufacturing scheduling problem and used to build a novel cooperative system, which can find optimal/near-optimal solutions within a reasonable computational time by employing those rules.