An alternate approach for real-time scheduling

With jobs increasing in automatic manufacturing system, real-time scheduling task becomes extremely heavy. For improving scheduling efficiency a new idea, self-scheduling, which based on the philosophy of competition is proposed. Simply to say, when you find it is too difficult to control more and more jobs in the manufacturing system, the better way is to leave them and let them to schedule themselves. Contrast with traditional single scheduler method, self-schedule regards all jobs as self schedulers, and each of them knows how to allocate necessary resources to itself. When proper competition rules are made and all jobs do their best, high system performance can be expected. In this paper, the concept of self-scheduling is introduced at first. Then the self-scheduling approach are addressed in detail. Its implementation problems and support technology, such as parallel processing, dynamic data exchange are discussed. At last simulation is employed to compare the system performance for different number of jobs between traditional scheduling and self-scheduling.