Autonomous Agents Applied to Manufacturing Scheduling Problems: A Negotiation-Based Heuristic Approach

In this paper, a heuristic approach to job scheduling, which is based on a multi-agent system model, is proposed. The class of scheduling problems considered is characterized by the presence of independent jobs and identical parallel machines, and by a non-regular objective, including both job earliness and tardiness penalties. The multi-agent scheduling system is composed by different classes of agents, and a schedule is progressively defined by a negotiation protocol among the agents associated with the jobs and the machines