Multi-Agent Scheduling Transient Inter-Production States for Many Cyclic Productions

Our interest in this paper is about the cyclic scheduling problem for flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). We present a multi-agent model for scheduling the transient states between successive cyclic productions which is called transient inter-productions. This new state allows going from a cyclic state to the following one. Our model is composed of cooperating agents aiming to minimize the global makespan while reducing temporal complexity. In fact, in the cyclic context, the determination of the cyclic productions to respect the initial demand is allowed by the planning phase. These cyclic productions have to be sequenced each one in relation to the others and this is done by our model which simultaneously optimize the transient inter-production states