Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
381383 Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence 2008 14 Pages PDF
Abstract

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) are highly automated and require effective scheduling approaches to improve the system performance and integrate various control decision-making activities. In this paper, a multi-agent approach integrated with a filtered-beam-search (FBS)-based heuristic algorithm is proposed to study the dynamic scheduling problem in a FMS shop floor consisting of multiple manufacturing cells. The approach is based on a hybrid architecture which is composed of a set of distributed agents each using local information to generate real-time schedules. The FBS-based algorithm is embedded into agents as the scheduling engine, which makes improvement in the generation procedure of branches to obtain optimal or sub-optimal schedules quickly. A FIPA CNIP-based negotiation mechanism is utilized to realize coordination of agents to achieve a globally good schedule. To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach, a proof-of-concept prototype system has been implemented in the JADE™ platform. Computational experiments of the approach are also presented in comparison with those of other methods.

Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Computer Science Artificial Intelligence
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