A Multi-agent Based Dynamic Scheduling of Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

Ongoing market requirements and real-time demands have led to intense competiveness in the manufacturing industry. Hence competitors are bound to employ newer means of manufacturing systems that can handle the ongoing market conditions in a flexible and efficient manner. To tackle these problems manufacturing control systems have evolved to the distributed manufacturing control system by exploiting their control architectures. These distributed control architectures provide an efficient mechanism that gives reactive and dynamically optimized system performance. This paper studies the impact of design and control factors on the performance of flexible manufacturing system. The system is evaluated on the basis of makespan, average machine utilization and the average waiting time of parts at the queue. Discrete-event based simulation models are developed to conduct simulation experiments. The results obtained were subjected to multi-response optimization as per Grey based Taguchi methodology. The effect of control architecture was statistically significant on the performance of flexible manufacturing system.