MRPlanner: An agent-based MMRP constraint programming system

Manufacturing material resource planning (MMRP) increasingly involves complex sets of objectives and constraints; therefore traditional approaches typically result in a large monolithic model that is difficult to solve, understand, and maintain. The paper presents a multiagent-based constraint programming system, namely MRPlanner, which is aimed to solving large, particularly combinatorial, problems in MMRP. The system uses an asynchronous team (A-Team) architecture in which multiple problem solving agents cooperate with each other by exchanging results to produce a set of non-dominated solutions that show the tradeoffs between objectives. The agent-based approach employed in the system significantly improves the performance, reliability, intelligence and automation of constraint programming.