Abstract
This paper proposes a cooperative scheduling method with the Genetic Algorithm (GA) for the CIM (Computer Integrated Manufacturing) system.
There are many scheduling problems in the CIM, such as design scheduling, production scheduling and transportation scheduling. Recently, the GA has been applied to these problems, and has shown a high performance in scheduling problems. However, the application has been done to an individual problem in the CIM system. Since the scheduling problems have some relations with each other, it is important to consider these problems from the view points of total elapsed time, total cost, total energy consumption, etc.
This paper proposes a cooperative scheduling method using multi-agent model. Each agent independently solves its own problem using the GA and has a function to tune the parameters for strategic search through interactions with each agent. This system is flexible in coping with the changes of environment, such as the change of scheduling conditions or trouble of some machines. Simulations are done to show the feasibility of proposed method, using Jobshop Scheduling Problem (JSP) and Transportation Problem (TP).
