A multi-agent and holonic approach for intelligent scheduling in agile manufacturing environments

An agile production scheduling system is developed using the notion which combines the multi-agent paradigm and the holonic manufacturing concept. A system framework with several "holonic-agents" is described firstly to show how the two paradigms are amalgamated. Then the distributed ruler based mechanism is proposed to coordinate behaviors of these holonic-agents in order to realize a predictable and nearly optimal scheduling with agility and adaptability. The object-oriented and CORBA based technique is also discussed briefly to construct a prototype system for the presented approach. Satisfactory conclusions are drawn from experiments and a short analysis of them is given at the end of the paper.