Distributed scheduling of an assembly shop

Past approaches to solving the assembly scheduling problem have mainly been from the consideration of a hierarchically controlled shop. Thus, the problem is considered in its entirety and solved in a monolithic fashion. However, in recent times, there have been attempts to impose heterarchical or distributed control. The paper extends the work of Welgama (1997) in the area of distributed behaviour-based control and examines the performance of a model based on this for scheduling assembly problems. Using this approach, we investigate the performance of a set of scheduling problems for a 3-stage 4-station assembly problem. This performance is compared with a mixed integer programming (MIP) model of the same situation. The results are promising and show comparative due date and makespan performance.