Multi-agent systems in production planning and control: An application to the scheduling of mixed-model assembly lines

This work deals with production smoothing, one of the keys of success of Just In Time and Lean Production. By levelling the load of the workstations, production smoothing allows a regular material Row, shorter manufacturing lead times, and lower work in process. Different solutions to the mixed-model assembly lines sequencing problem have been proposed in literature. In this paper, a Multi-Agent System is presented, which solves this problem according to the theory of autonomous agents. The experimental results show that this innovative approach has a good performance if compared with the traditional ones. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.