Application of multi-agent planning to the assignment problem

Abstract

Nowadays, a globalization of national markets requires developing the flexible and demand-driven production systems with new innovative concepts of management, information processing, production scheduling and planning. The presented work focuses on the low-level planning, where the multi-agent solution towards a “job-machine” assignment is considered. The main point of the discussion is the flexibility of planning systems ensured by the concept of agent’s “roles” and “emergencies”. Depending on the state of “emergency”, the system receives stepwisely additional degrees of freedom to adapt the planning to the changing conditions of the manufacturing floor. The distributed constraint satisfaction and optimization approaches, underlying the suggested method, as well as activities of rescue agents, are described in the form of Petri networks providing both the conceptual notions and main details of implementation.