A multi-agent system for dynamic integrated process planning and scheduling using heuristics

LNCS v. 7327 entitled: Agent and multi-agent systems. Technologies and applications : 6th KES International Conference, KES-AMSTA 2012 ... proceedingsPaper no. ams12-018Integrated process planning and scheduling (IPPS) is an NP-hard problem, the major research on the multi-agent system (MAS) based IPPS systems has focused on the establishment of negotiation protocols to accomplish the integration of process planning and scheduling. However, not much consideration has been paid to the dynamic factors of current manufacturing systems. In this paper, an MAS architecture is proposed to solve the dynamic IPPS problem with embedded heuristic algorithms. The proposed MAS system can be combined with a variety of heuristic methods to support dynamic process planning, scheduling and re-scheduling. As a result, the proposed MAS system for dynamic IPPS using heuristics possesses high flexibility, extensibility, and accessibility for manufacturing applications. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.link_to_subscribed_fulltex