A multi Agent System Based on Modified Shifting Bottleneck and Search Techniques for Job Shop Scheduling Problems

This paper presents a multi agent system for the job shop scheduling problems. The proposed system consists of initial scheduling agent, search agents, and schedule management agent. In initial scheduling agent, a modified Shifting Bottleneck is proposed. That is, an effective heuristic approach and can generate a good solution in a low computational effort. In search agents, a hybrid search approach is presented. The schedule management agent can manage the system. Finally, the proposed agent based system is tested and validated by some benchmark problems. The results show the superiority of the proposed system in terms of makespan minimization and CPU times.