An agent-based negotiation approach to integrate process planning and scheduling

Abstract

This paper presents the development of an agent-based negotiation approach to integrate process planning and scheduling (IPPS) in a job shop kind of flexible manufacturing environment. The agent-based system comprises two types of agents, part agents and machine agents, to represent parts and machines respectively. For each part, all feasible manufacturing processes and routings are recorded as alternative process plans. Similarly, alternative machines for an operation are also considered. With regard to the scheduling requirements and the alternative process plans of a part, the proposed agent-based IPPS system aims to specify the process routing and to assign the manufacturing resources effectively. To establish task allocations, the part and machine agents have to engage in bidding. Bids are evaluated in accordance with a currency function which considers an agent's multi-objectives and IPPS parameters. A negotiation protocol is developed for negotiations between the part agents and the machine agents. The protocol is modified from the contract net protocol to cater for the multiple-task and many-to-many negotiations in this paper. An agent-based framework is established to simulate the proposed IPPS approach. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The performance measures, including makespan and flowtime, are compared with those of a search technique based on a co-evolutionary algorithm.

Review on Integration of Process Planning and Scheduling

“…Authors concluded that in the pursuit of local objectives such as parts flow time, the proposed approach performs better than meta-heuristics. Wong et al, (2006b) extended their earlier work (Wong et al, 2006a) and proposed a hybrid-based multi-agent system called Online Hybrid Agents-based Negotiation (oHAN). It was consists of local agents (part and machine agents) and a supervisor agent.…”

“…Authors concluded that job tardiness was reduced utilising the proposed heuristic that can explore process plan solution space. Wong et al, (2006a) developed an agents-based multi-stage negotiation protocol scheme for IPPS in a job shop. It contained part agents and machine agents to represent parts and machines respectively.…”

Integrated process planning and scheduling using genetic algorithms

“…The data set consists of 10-jobs to be scheduled on 9-machines and also considers setup times. The problem has also been solved by Jain and Elmaraghy [10] using GA, Wong et al [46] using an agent based negotiation approach and Lihong and Shengping [35] using an improved GA (IGA). The value of makespan by the three studies was 6 456, 6 574 and 5 998.…”

Integrated process planning and scheduling by an agent-based ant colony optimization

“…Advanced metaheuristics such as tabu search (Weintraub et al, 1999), genetic algorithm (Lee & Kim, 2001) and other evolutionary algorithms (Kis, 2003) are found to be more effective and efficient for larger IPPS problems, with the objective to find near-optimal solutions in a reasonable time. The authors have engaged in the development of agent-based IPPS systems (Wong, Leung, Mak, & Fung, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c. A MAS-based decentralized negotiation has been established for solving the IPPS problems, with advantages of flexible system architectures and responsive fault tolerance.…”