Multi-agent fuzzy control of operation dispatching in flexible manufacturing environments

This paper describes a negotiation algorithm for task contracting in multi-agent manufacturing systems based on fuzzy techniques. In the proposed approach, operations on raw parts are executed on the workstation with a processing priority resulting from a negotiation between the agents controlling the machine and the parts flowing in the systems. Pricing and decision criteria encompass a set of variables taking into account different aspects of the available alternatives, as processing and setup times, workload in queues, buffer saturation or starvation. The proposed approach is compared with analogous strategies derived from literature on a simulation model of a hypothetical manufacturing system that was recently proposed as benchmark for multi-agent control systems.