Scheduling in Distributed Production Systems

This paper reports on the research conducted to investigate a behaviour-based approach to scheduling a distributed autonomous manufacturing system. This approach is unusual and largely unexplored in the area of scheduling and advances self- control of the autonomous entities as an alternative to purely reactive control through negotiations. A model is proposed to realise these characteristics that incorporates adaptive mechanisms, dynamic problem decomposition and local scheduling algorithms. The scheduling performance of the model for fairly complex production situations indicates a performance comparable to well-known heuristics.