CORBA-based design and development of distributed scheduling systems: an application to flexible flow shop scheduling systems

Abstract

Presents a CORBA-based framework for design of distributed scheduling systems and its application to flexible flow-shop scheduling systems. We model two kinds of agent for each shop: scheduling agent and communication agent. The communication agent communicates with related agents dynamically on CORBA. It reasons about the environment encountered and recommends adaptive scheduling algorithm(s) to the scheduling agent, it also announces the inside situation and requires the cooperation from related agents. The scheduling agent carries out shop scheduling decisions based on the suggested algorithm(s) by the communication agent. The behavior of the entire scheduling system is determined by collaborating with all shops. A mechanism to achieve the entire objectives of the scheduling system is proposed by composing several collaborating rules in response to real-time communication information. An application of to a flow shop is presented to show the validity of the proposed method, and that it exhibits attractive performance in terms of autonomy and collaboration. In addition, the proposed method has high flexibility in terms of easy modification to the scheduling system, and has a promising prospect for solving large-scale flow shop scheduling problems.