Abstract

Background: The manufacturing sector has observed dynamic changes during the last few years, from the product-oriented local economy to the customer-driven global economy. In this environment, manufacturing systems have been required to deliver highly flexible, demanddriven and customized products. Hence, the Multi-Agent System (MAS) technology can play an important role in making highly responsive production scheduling systems in order to meet dynamic and uncertain changes in demand.

Methods: This paper offers a review of MAS for production scheduling problems in manufacturing systems. The objective of the paper is twofold. First, it describes traditional and MAS based approaches for different production scheduling problems and presents the advantages of MAS over traditional approaches. Second, it aims to review different MAS platforms and evaluate some key issues involved in MAS based production scheduling.

Results: A variety of different MAS applications in the production schedule is reviewed in four categories of key issues: agent encapsulation, agent organization, agent coordination & negotiation and agent learning.

Conclusion: Finally, this review presents a conceptual framework to implement MAS in production scheduling and also highlights future research opportunities as well as challenges.

Keywords: Multi agent system, manufacturing system, production scheduling, agent based approach, job shop, agent organization.

Graphical Abstract