Integrated process planning and scheduling using multi-agent methodology

Market growth and mass customization cause a need for a change in traditional manufacturing. Decentralized decision making and integration of process planning is necessary in order to become concurrent in the market. The paper presents decentralized decision making methodology using multi-agent systems. The model is used for integrated process planning and scheduling based on the minimum processing time under dynamic change of the environment. Two types of disturbance are used to represent the change: part arrival and machine breakdown. The proposed model comprises part agent, job agent, machine agent and optimization agent. Comparative analysis is conducted using simulation in AnyLogic software in order to verify the proposed approach.