The paper presents an integrated production planner and job shop scheduler system with flexible modeling capabilities and powerful, scalable solution methods. The system generates close-to-optimal production and capacity plans on the medium term, and detailed production schedules on the short-term. However, the constraint-based, deterministic scheduling model can hardly account for all the unce...

In this article an agent-based architecture in which cooperation is regulated by contracts is proposed as a flexible approach to dynamic shop floor re-engineering. It describes the dynamic and flexible co-operation of manufacturing agents, representing manufacturing resources, and how they can be created from a generic agent template. Agents behaviour and contract types and structure are discus...

For the purpose of solving the flexible job-shop scheduling problem (FJSP), an improved quantum genetic algorithm based on earliness/tardiness penalty coefficient is proposed in this paper. For minimizing the completion time and the job-shop cost, a simulation model was established firstly. Next, according to the characteristics of the due in production, a double penalty coefficient was designe...

IN:SHOP uses the blue-c 3D video technology to implement distributed shopping in a shared virtual world. IN:SHOP combines traditional shopping and marketing structures with 3D computer graphics, telepresence, spatially immersive displays, and internet shopping paradigms to create a flexible and adaptable commercial environment. The application is an enhancement of the traditional, physical shop...

This paper focuses on three very similar evolutionary algorithms: genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and differential evolution (DE). While GA is more suitable for discrete optimization, PSO and DE are more natural for continuous optimization. The paper first gives a brief introduction to the three EA techniques to highlight the common computational procedures. The gener...

Flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP) is an extended traditional job shop scheduling problem, which more approximates to real scheduling problems. This paper presents a multi-objective genetic algorithm (GA) based on immune and entropy principle to solve the multi-objective FJSP. In this improved multi-objective GA, the immune and entropy principle is used to keep the diversity of individ...

The paper deals with the open-shop problems with unit-time operations and nonde-creasing symmetric objective functions depending on job completion times. We construct two schedules, one of them is optimal for any symmetric convex function, the other is optimal for any symmetric concave function. Each of these two schedules is given by an analytically deened function which assigns to each operat...