Controllable processing time policies for job shop manufacturing system

The research presented concerns the policy to manage a job shop in which the machines have controllable processing times. A controllable processing time means that it can be reduced processing time by using additional resources. The model proposed is based on a multi-agent architecture that supports the manufacturing system. The policy proposed concerns the evaluation of the workload of the resources. It is necessary to define the following issues for the controllable time process of a resource: the condition of start and the duration of the process time reduction. Two approaches are proposed to assign the resources to the machines. The first approach concerns the reduction of the processing time one machine at time, while the second approach distributes the additional resources proportionally among the machines. A simulation environment is developed to test the proposed approach in several dynamic conditions. The simulation results show that the control of the processing times proposed allows to improve significantly the performance.