An Agent-Based Scheduling Framework for Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Authors: Iman Badr

Abstract:

The concept of flexible manufacturing is highly appealing in gaining a competitive edge in the market by quickly adapting to the changing customer needs. Scheduling jobs on flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) is a challenging task of managing the available flexibility on the shop floor to react to the dynamics of the environment in real-time. In this paper, an agent-oriented scheduling framework that can be integrated with a real or a simulated FMS is proposed. This framework works in stochastic environments with a dynamic model of job arrival. It supports a hierarchical cooperative scheduling that builds on the available flexibility of the shop floor. Testing the framework on a model of a real FMS showed the capability of the proposed approach to overcome the drawbacks of the conventional approaches and maintain a near optimal solution despite the dynamics of the operational environment.

Keywords: Autonomous agents, Flexible manufacturing systems(FMS), Manufacturing scheduling, Real-time systems.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1056972

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