A Study on A Real-time Scheduling of Holonic Manufacturing Systems : Decision Making Processes based on Utilities

Abstract

This paper deals with a real time scheduling system of a holonic manufacturing system for machining process. The holonic manufacturing system was proposed by HMS cooperative research project aiming at realizing more flexible control structures of the manufacturing systems which can cope with the variety of the products and the unscheduled disruptions, such as status changes of equipment and input of high priority jobs. Decision making procedures of individual holons are discussed in the paper to establish a decision making process based on utilities for the holonic real time scheduling systems.