Backgrounds:
The manufacturing sector has seen dynamic changes during the
last few years, namely the move from product-oriented local economy to customer-driven
global economy. In this environment, manufacturing systems have been required to deliver
highly flexible, demand-driven and customized products. Hence, multi agent system (MAS)
technology can play an important role in making highly responsive production scheduling
systems in order to meet dynamic and uncertain changes in demand.
Methods:
This paper
offers a review of MAS for production scheduling problems in manufacturing systems. The
objective of the paper is twofold. First, it describes traditional and MAS based approaches
for different production scheduling problems and presents advantages of MAS over
traditional approaches. Second, it aims to review different MAS platforms and evaluate
some key issues involved in MAS based production scheduling.
Results:
A variety of
different MAS applications in production scheduling is reviewed in four categories of key
issues: agent encapsulation, agent organization, agent coordination & negotiation and agent
learning.
Conclusion:
Finally, this review presents a conceptual framework to implement
MAS in production scheduling and also highlights the future research opportunities as well
as challenges.
Ant Colony Intelligence in Flexible Manufacturing Scheduling Using Contract-Net Model
