A game-theoretic approach to real-time distributed shop floor control

Shop Floor control has been a key area fur research for several decades. Most of the control methods developed are centralized and static. This paper, presents a real-time distributed shop floor control system, which dynamically routes and schedules the jobs among several non-identical candidate machines using real-time information, Each machine exchanges information about its status with other machines. In addition, each machine can have some characteristic feature that affects its behavior. The paper presents a game-theoretic approach for the shop floor control, The operations to be performed on a parts act as players with the alternate machines used as their strategies. The operation selects the machines, which leads it to the maximum payoff, The payoff to an operation using a particular strategy considers the present system status and the future operations on the job, thus avoiding myopic decisions.