Abstract

Abstract In addition to the inherent dynamism associated with any shop floor, a job shop environment exhibits certain additional features that promotes the use of decentralized over centralized decision support systems on the benchmark of responsiveness. The current work first highlighted the system level and operational complexities associated with a job shop environment and very objectively established the need for a decentralized decision support system for such set ups. Unlike various attempts of developing agent systems for shop floor, where major focus has been on imparting intelligence to scheduling agents, the current work took into account the need for integrating multiple shop floor functions, namely scheduling and maintenance, and demonstrated the development of a decision mechanism considering more than one shop floor function. The detailed design constitutes a global scheduling agent for entire floor and a set of local scheduling and maintenance agents for each machine on the floor. The novelty of the work lies in the thoroughness with which individual agent design has been attempted. The work reported in this paper added to the multiagent literature, specifically in the context of manufacturing, by answering certain questions like “how should intelligence be built into a shop floor agent?’ and ‘how could agents from different domains be integrated?” The work also highlights the fact that the advantage of agent features can be leveraged in true sense and systems based on them could be successful only if means of integrating heterogeneous functions are taken into account.

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