Abstract
A distributed scheduling system is proposed for processes consisting of a sequence of production stages. In the proposed system, an individual sub-scheduling system is installed for each stage. A whole schedule is generated by repeating the schedule generation at each sub-system and by exchanging data among sub-systems using message passing. The simulation results show that the schedule generated by the proposed system is as good as the one obtained by the centralized scheduling method. Furthermore, by using multiple PCs concurrently, the scheduling time can be reduced drastically compared with the case where a single PC is used.
