Real-Virtual Fusion Manufacturing Scheduling with Social Contract Based Approach

—Application of Combinatorial Auction Method at Planning Phase—

Abstract

In this study, a new concept named Real-Virtual Fusion Manufacturing System (RVF-MS) is proposed, which aims to adaptively and effectively deal with both external and internal fluctuations in production by realizing a fusion between real production shop floor (real system) and virtual manufacturing system model (virtual system). In order to realize the proposed methodology, multi-agent system is used for constructing dynamic model in virtual system. In this paper, a new production scheduling mechanism at planning phase for RVF-MS is proposed, where a social contract based approach, named Combinatorial Auction (CA), with Local Search method is applied. The effectiveness of RVF-MS is verified by computational experiments for flexible flow shop problem.