Hybrid Multi-agent System for Cooperative Dynamic Scheduling Through Meta-Heuristics

This paper describes a Hybrid Multi-agent Scheduling System that assumes the existence of several Agents (which are decision-making entities) distributed inside the Manufacturing System. To solve the scheduling problem, Machine Agents and Task Agents must interact and cooperate with other agents in order to obtain optimal or near-optimal global performances trough Meta-heuristics. The idea is that from local, autonomous and often conflicting agent's objectives, a global solution emerges from a community of machine agents solving locally their schedules while cooperating with other machine agents. Agents have to manage their internal behaviors and their relationships with other agents via cooperative negotiation in accordance with business policies defined by the user manager.