On agent-based decentralized and integrated scheduling for small-scale manufacturing

Abstract

© 2020 Gehlhoff and Fay. Small-scale manufacturing often relies on flexible production systems that can cope with frequent changes of products and equipment. Transports are a significant part of the production flow, especially in the domain of large and heavy workpieces that requires explicit planning to avoid unnecessary delays. This contribution takes a detailed look at how to create feasible integrated schedules within a decentralised or even heterarchical architecture and which information the agents have to exchange. These schedules incorporate constraints such as the blocking-constraint. They also consider dynamic setup and operation durations while finding a good-enough solution. The proposed agent-based solution applies to a wide variety of scheduling problems and reveals positive properties in terms of scalability and reconfigurability.