Agent-Based Dynamic Scheduling Approach for Collaborative Manufacturing

The rapidly changing market requires integrating information and collaborating among organizations to schedule jobs to machines that satisfy the objectives of service providers, and requesters. Moreover, delivering dynamic scheduling remains a major challenge especially when a diverse number of service providers and service requesters are geographically distributed. In this dynamic environment, scheduling usually involves complex and non-deterministic interactions between different participants. In this work, we propose a distributed multi-agent approach to model dynamic scheduling solution in manufacturing. We believe that agent-based model is appropriate due to its characteristics to support both dynamic behavior and distributed structure. The proposed approach is validated through a prototype implementation using the Coordinated Intelligent Rational Agent (CIR-Agent) model.