Agent-based shop-floor scheduling of multi stage systems

In short term scheduling, distributed systems have an hedge over centralized ones under many points of view. Among the others, they can solve large problems by splitting them in simple tasks, and can tolerate uncertain data and knowledge. In literature a few distributed architecture for short term scheduling have been presented, but all of them concerns sequential operations. On the contrary, in reality most plant are multi stage systems, where also assembly operations are performed. In this paper an Agent based shop-floor scheduling system that addresses the issue of co-ordinating componentsʹ completion is presented, and its performances tested.