Development of an Agent-Based Collaborative Production System Based on Real-Time Order-Driven Approach

With high variation of ordering in current marketing environment, the collaboration of dynamic production planning and scheduling strategies is becoming critical for manufacturers to make quick and correct decisions. On the basis of the complex and distributed semiconductor manufacturing system environment, it is imperative to consider the external disturbances on production scheduling and solve the related issues. However, current researches mostly focus on the collaboration issues within factory internal hierarchy, and lots of methods are discussed on the job sequence or order fulfillment problems on the work cells. Toward this end, a real-time order-driven (RTOD) approach is introduced to assist manufacturers in responding to real-time orders and reflecting them into collaborative production planning and scheduling. An agent-based heterarchical model is established to modularize the collaboration process of planning and scheduling accordingly. A distributed algorithm is provided to quantify the different scenarios during the collaboration, and three sub-algorithms are discussed in detail. Subsequently, the interaction process of each agent is discussed to identify the solutions paths in accordance with the proposed algorithms specifically. A case study is conducted in S semiconductor factory. A Java Agent Development Frameworks platform is developed to simulate the presented collaborative system, and two numerical experiments testified the effectiveness of RTOD approach accordingly.