Multi-agent approach for the dynamic scheduling of machines of flexible manufacturing systems

Nowadays, when it comes to increasing the productivity of enterprises, it poses a major importance for them to follow the developments in technology. Under the conditions in which market structure is different and costumers? desires and demands are unsteady, the systems which are more flexible and automated are replaced with traditional manufacturing systems. In manufacturing systems, one of the most effective flexibility types is machine flexibility. When demand fluctuations emerge, machine flexibility has positive contributions as for providing customers? aspirations punctually. In this study, an agent based system is proposed to simultaneous scheduling of flexible machine groups and material handling system in Flexible Manufacturing Systems. The proposed model is designed by means of PrometheusTM methodology and coded in JACKTM Agent Language. Each agent in the model, which is situated, is autonomous and has an ability to cooperate and negotiate with the other agents in the system. Due to these abilities of agents, the structure of the system becomes more dynamic. The proposed model is tested on test problems from the literature and the results are quite satisfactory. Although the model is designed as online method and has a dynamic structure, the obtained schedules are similar to those obtained from offline heuristic algorithms.