Integrated dynamic process planning and scheduling in flexible manufacturing systems via autonomous agents

Process planning and scheduling are important manufacturing planning activities which deal with resource utilization and time span of the manufacturing operations. The process plans and the schedules generated in the planning phase shall be modified in the execution phase due to the disturbances in the manufacturing systems. This paper deals with a multi-agent architecture of an integrated and dynamic system for process planning and scheduling for multi jobs. Systematic methods are proposed to generate the process plans and the schedules of the manufacturing resources and the individual jobs, dynamically and incrementally. A simulation software has been prepared to carry out case studies, aimed at verifying the performance of the proposed multi-agent architecture.