Negotiation Strategies for Multi-Agent Flexible Job-shop Scheduling

The Flexible Job-shop Scheduling Problem(FJSP) is a generalization of the classical Job-shop Scheduling Problem(JSP).In this paper,a multi-Agent negotiation and scheduling strategy based on biding is proposed.This study focuses on bid calculation.The system contains part Agent and machine Agent.Through biding part Agent selects the appropriate machine and machine Agent selects the appropriate part by competing with others based on market mechanism to maximize its income and use dispatching rules to schedule the parts.The system is implemented in Java and the proposed algorithm is tested on a standard instance taken from the literature and compared with other approaches.Experimental results show the effectiveness of the negotiation function.