A multi-agent system for sharing distributed manufacturing resources. (1st June 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Li, Kai; Zhou, Tao; Liu, Bo-hai; Li, Hui
• Is Part Of: Expert systems with applications. Volume 99(2018)
• Page Start: 32
• Page End: 43
• Publication Date: 2018-06-01
• Subjects: Multi-agent system -- Shared scheduling -- Distributed manufacturing resources -- Shared contract net protocol -- Heuristic algorithms; Expert systems (Computer science) -- Periodicals; Systèmes experts (Informatique) -- Périodiques; Electronic journals; 006.33
• DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2018.01.027
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0957-4174

Abstract

Highlights: The problem of sharing distributed manufacturing resources is described. A shared multi-agent system including two main architectures is constructed. Two improved heuristic algorithms called MAS-MSDT and MAS-LSS are proposed for solving SSDMR. Experiment results prove the advantage of MAS-MSDT compared with MAS-LSS. Abstract: This paper considers a shared scheduling environment for distributed manufacturing resources. In this paper, we proposed a multi-agent system based approach to promote competition and cooperation among multi-agents and to achieve global optimal scheduling. We first build two multi-agent system (MAS) architectures. One is enterprise multi-agent subsystem (Sub-EMAS) architecture comprises job agents, resource agents and manager agents; the other one is enterprise alliance multi-agent system (EA-MAS) architecture involves the addition of a mediator agent and a scheduling agent. Then we design a Shared Contract Net Protocol (SCNP) to support both the Sub-EMAS and EA-MAS. We propose two heuristic algorithms to solve the scheduling model. The computational experiments show that the EA-MAS, with the integration of shared resource information, is able to provide shared scheduling scheme for distributed manufacturing with a good performance.