Stable distributed real-time scheduling of flexible manufacturing/assembly/disassembly systems

The authors propose a dynamic model of the manufacturing environment which allows a real-time, distributed approach to scheduling. They first consider a single machine, and then they consider an interconnection of machines called a distributed clear-a-fraction policy which results in an acyclic system such as a flow shop. Finally, they treat a general manufacturing system with no restrictions on interconnections, using a clear-a-fraction policy with backoff, which can be shown to be stable