Constraint priority scheduling using an agent-based approach

Purpose - Scheduling needs to be concise and well-determined but able to respond to the ever-changing and uncertain market or environment against the constraints of production capacity, resources, time frame, etc. The purpose of this paper is to model and solve a scheduling problem with another domain perspective that adopts the concept of agent; and an agent-based scheduling environment is proposed for solving the scheduling problem, in which three agents are developed, i.e. a sales agent, a scheduling agent, and a production agent. Design/methodology/approach - The modeling and development of the proposed agent-based scheduling environment and its agents under constraints are discussed. Constraint priority scheduling concepts are applied to the environment and its agents, and the feature of responding to customer change orders is included in the model. The proposed agent-based scheduling environment with three agents is applied to a lamp-manufacturing company in China as a case study, and the integrated agent-based approach is also illustrated in the case study. Findings - Throughout the autonomous communication between agents in the proposed model, a constraint-prioritized schedule is generated to fulfill customer orders and customer change orders, as well as to achieve a better scheduling performance result. From the simulation results and analysis in the case study, satisfactory results show that the proposed model can generate a constraint-prioritized schedule for the studied company that can completely fulfill customer orders, adjust and fulfill customer change orders, and achieve a better scheduling result. Originality/value - In this paper, the scheduling problem is modeled and solved by using the domain perspective of agent-based approach. By using an agent-based approach, the agents can be implemented to represent manufacturing resources or aggregations of resources. Under the proposed modeling approach, the collaboration across the entire scheduling activities can be enhanced, and the efficiency and effectiveness in the scheduling activities can also be increased.