The Use of Expert Systems Associated to Agents for Routing Suggestions for Service Orders

In dynamic environments, a great obstacle for the integration between process planning and production scheduling is the lack of flexibility for the analysis of alternative resources during the allocation of the jobs on the shop floor. In this phase the process plan is treated as fixed, that is, scheduling does not consider all the possible manufacturing combinations. In order to solve this problem, it was proposed and developed a multiagent system that enables the use of process plans with on-line alternatives. After implementing the system, a large number of tests were carried out, resulting in a database with more than twelve thousand simulations. By analyzing the results, it was observed that despite shorter makespan and flow times were attained, the standard deviation was high when comparing with other approaches found in the literature. As the problem is significantly complex, involving many parts, resources and alternative plans, an Expert Agent based on the JESS language (Java Expert System Shell) was implemented which, through the application of rules, filters the information in the database of simulations and provides the system with an adequate suggestion of the route to be executed.