Task rescheduling in multi-agent manufacturing

We present a model for task rescheduling in multi-agent manufacturing that is geared toward maximising system efficiency and reliability in an environment with predictable failure patterns. We describe a distributed manufacturing system architecture (http://hms.ifw.uni-hannover.de/public/overview.html) to illustrate the merits of rescheduling. We also develop an action redistribution framework based upon resource cooling, i.e. migrating actions from the most utilised or faulty (hottest) agents´ resources to the coldest (least constrained) ones. Furthermore, the paper discusses the costs versus benefits of resource cooling when rescheduling cascades over parallel resources executing a decentralised production task