Solving the n-job 3-stage flexible flowshop scheduling problem using an agent-based approach

In this paper, a general methodology of agent- based manufacturing systems scheduling, incorporating game theoretic analysis of agent cooperation is presented to solve the n- job 3- stage. flexible. flowshop scheduling problem. The. flowshops are. flexible in the sense that a job can be processed by any of the identical machines at each stage. Our objective is to schedule a set of n jobs so as to minimize the makespan. We perform error bound analysis using the lower bound estimates developed in the literature as a datum for comparing the agent- based scheduling solutions with other heuristic solutions. The results of the evaluation show that the agent- based scheduling approach outperforms existing heuristics for the majority of the testing problems.