A distributed scheduling for agro-food manufacturing problems

Workshop scheduling problems can be considered as one of the main factors to improve the productivity and efficiency of a manufacturing system. The continuous evolution and the dynamic characteristics of industrial workshops, particularly those of agro-food industries, impose the generation of a real time decision scheduling process. In the agro-food industries, the products to be processed and the used primary products are characterized by their limit validity dates which generate some particularly and especially antagonist criteria. A distributed decision support system for real time scheduling is described in this paper. It is based on an original cooperative approach aimed to elaborate robust decisions that propose to the "best action" to the decision maker. The decision process is distributed all along the production chain. At each decision time, in order to ensure coherency, we have to take into account the neighborhood constraints in order to simultaneously satisfy different criteria which do not have the same importance. An aggregation criteria system is defined to manage the criteria among their importance degrees. We define a decisional model based on the evaluation and the comparison of a set of proposed actions.