Multi-Agent System for Dynamic Manufacturing Scheduling using Meta-Heuristics

In this paper we will model a Manufacturing System by means of a Multi-Agent Systems, where each agent may represent a processing entity. This work has as objective to deal with the complex problem of Dynamic Scheduling in Manufacturing Systems. We want to prove that a good global solution for a scheduling problem may emerge from a community of machine agents solving locally their schedules and cooperating with other machine agents that shares some relations between the operations/jobs. The proposed approach is in line with reality and away from the approaches that deal with static and classic or basic Job-Shop scheduling problems. In fact, in real world, where problems are essentially of dynamic and stochastic nature, the traditional methods or algorithms are of very little use. This is the case with most algorithms for solving the so-called static scheduling problem for different setting of both single and multimachine systems arrangements. This reality, motivated us to concentrate on tools, which could deal with such dynamic, disturbed scheduling problems, for multi-machine manufacturing settings, even though, due to the complexity of these problems, optimal solutions may not be possible to find. Key-Words: Multi-Agent Systems, Dynamic and Distributed Scheduling, Meta-Heuristics, Manufacturing