Multi-agent-Based Negotiation Approach for Scheduling Jobs on Parallel Machines with Ready Times and Machine Preference

The manufacturing processes of aluminum foil often included seven main steps and the electro-etching is critical step which usually has many parallel machines with three distinct voltage equipments. Therefore, the production scheduling is parallel-machine and its choices of eligibility. In this paper, an agent-based architecture is proposed to develop a parallel-machine scheduling application for this manufacturing environment. There are three types of agents in the proposed system. Each job/machine is viewed as a agent, named job/machine agent. To establish job allocations, job agents and machine agents have to bid interactively. Management agent plays as a system supervisor and coordinator to manage negotiation processes between job agents and machine agents to ensure the global objectives such as minimizing total jobs' tardiness and flow time, balancing machines' loading, and maximizing total revenue can be achieved. Eventually, experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The result shows that the proposed architecture provides a parallel eligible machines scheduling solutions with a better performance.