A self-organizing model for scheduling distributed autonomous manufacturing systems

This paper proposes an approach to scheduling distributed autonomous manufacturing entities founded on the principles of self-organization. In this approach, called the behavior-based approach, the individual entities are endowed with adaptable scheduling behaviors and the ability to cooperate with each other. The individual adaptation helps a unit to deal with schedule perturbations from the environment. More important, it indirectly contributes to the community-level performance, such as to produce quality schedules jointly, reduce uncontrollable perturbations, and maintain stable allocations. This model has been tested for a variety of production situations and the results are promising. In this paper, we describe the underlying concepts of the model and outline the results of the experiments.