Applied shop floor scheduling and sequencing in an agent-controlled production

The ongoing development in factory automation considers agent-controlled production systems as future alternatives to today´s most widely-spread centralized approaches. By distributing computational power and hardware controls over independent workplaces, new ways for order scheduling with all their subprocesses and interconnections must be introduced as there is no control center which knows the workload and schedule of every workplace. Material procurement also has to be taken into account when building the schedule. This paper presents an approach using a recursive scheduling algorithm to query and reserve free manufacturing capacities and material as well as an approach that relies on the earliest deadline first procedure.