A negotiation based scheduling for items with flexible process plans

A job-shop scheduling method is described utilizing a negotiation-based algorithm in autonomous distributed systems. Elements of a production system such as jobs and machines are regard as agents that act like an independent profit maker. A negotiation procedure is suggested including price-based bid construction and price revising mechanism. We propose a simulation-based iteration procedure in order to revise the decision making parameters. It is shown that the iterative procedure eventually improves the global performance of the entire system. The proposed method is expected to have flexibility against various system alternations, addition or deletion of jobs or sudden failure of machines. We develop a prototype software that utilizes the object oriented concept.