TABLE OF CONTENTS In this paper, an agent-based approach was designed for manufacturing system scheduling in an agile manufacturing environment. The general framework of the agent-based approach was presented. The successful implementation of agent-based approach strongly depends on how the system is decomposed into interrelated subsystems and the negotiation among the agents so that the integrity of the system is not violated. A decomposition method was proposed for successful decomposition of large size scheduling problems into sub-problems. Then negotiation mechanism was developed and incorporated into decision-making process in a multi agent environment. A lower and upper bound on maximum completion time were.
The decomposition method and agent-based tool were designed in a way that each agent is assigned a separate individual job to be scheduled in the system according to the precedence relationships of other agents' jobs. If any changes are made by users in component designs, or assembly structures the product designs, rescheduling can be done easily by corresponding agents in the scheduling system. In this sense, the schedule obtained by agent-based approach is robust. The developed approach integrates data and decisions associated with several entities within a scheduling system. This approach can be used to model and solve large-scale scheduling problems in an agile manufacturing environment. To demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed methodology, computational experiments were conducted. The results of tested problems show that the scheduling method obtains optimal or near optimal solutions.
