Adaptive manufacturing scheduling: a flexible and configurable agent-based prototype

To improve the decision support tools available to manufacturing engineers operating in less than certain environments, an agent-based manufacturing scheduling system has been developed. In this paper, the application of intelligent agents to manufacturing problems is discussed and a description of the developed system is provided. The proof-of-concept demonstrator was developed using the JADE platform, XML ontology and a message passing system based on the contract-net protocol. The system was designed to be generic, allowing it to be tailored to suit a wide variety of different manufacturing problems. To demonstrate this, the system was used to model an existing manufacturing cell within Rolls-Royce. The system successfully produced schedules of comparable quality to the existing control system, with the added capability to proactively adapt to changing circumstances. Further work includes the development of a statistical analysis tool set to support and further testing to quantify the operational benefits of the agent-based scheduler.

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