Self-organized manufacturing resource management: An ant-colony inspired approach

In a typical manufacturing system, jobs are released from a production planning stage to a shop floor, where they are allocated to resources like machines. An optimal or near optimal schedule is generally found for those jobs. In reality, the execution of this schedule is often interrupted by dynamic events like unexpected incoming new jobs, machine breakdowns, etc. A rapid recovery or a self-organized feature of the interrupted schedule is desirable for manufacturing resource management. This paper proposes an ant-colony inspired approach to recover the interrupted schedule through a self-organization mechanism. The experiments show that this mechanism significantly improves the quality of the recovered schedules.