Multi-agent system for dynamic scheduling and control in manufacturing cells

This paper describes an intelligent real time cell control architecture for flexible manufacturing systems. This architecture is based on the Multi-Agent concept of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence. We propose an actor architecture. This Multi-Agent prototype system involves the following functions:scheduling, dispatching, monitoring and error handling. A new contract net protocol for dynamic scheduling is presented. The purpose of this protocol is to dynamically assign operations to the resources of the Manufacturing system in order to accomplish the proposed tasks. This protocol is able to deal with exceptions.