Abstract
Backgrounds: The manufacturing sector has seen dynamic changes during the last few years, namely the move from product-oriented local economy to customer-driven global economy. In this environment, manufacturing systems have been required to deliver highly flexible, demand-driven and customized products. Hence, multi agent system (MAS) technology can play an important role in making highly responsive production scheduling systems in order to meet dynamic and uncertain changes in demand. Methods: This paper offers a review of MAS for production scheduling problems in manufacturing systems. The objective of the paper is twofold. First, it describes traditional and MAS based approaches for different production scheduling problems and presents advantages of MAS over traditional approaches. Second, it aims to review different MAS platforms and evaluate some key issues involved in MAS based production scheduling. Results: A variety of different MAS applications in production scheduling is reviewed in four categories of key issues: agent encapsulation, agent organization, agent coordination & negotiation and agent learning. Conclusion: Finally, this review presents a conceptual framework to implement MAS in production scheduling and also highlights the future research opportunities as well as challenges.
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