An Agent-Based Scheduling Method for Flexible Job Shops

In view of characteristics of flexible job shop scheduling, a distributed agent-based flexible scheduling system is proposed. The system contains job agents, unit agents and a global agent. Each relevant agent calculates an agent priority for competing jobs. The scheduling system determines each agent's weight based on system load and job due date, and obtains final priority as a weighted average of agent priorities. The system is implemented with Arena and simulated under various flexible job shop settings with weighted tardiness objective. The results show-that the proposed agent-based scheduling method significantly outperforms traditional dispatching rules.