An Agent-Based Approach for Scheduling Multiple Machines

We consider multiple objectives such as minimizing (weighted) earliness and tardiness, and minimizing job-machine assignment costs. We use an agent-based architecture called Asynchronous Team (A-Team), in which each agent encapsulates a different problem solving strategy and agents cooperate by exchanging results.

Computational experiments on large instances of real-world scheduling problems show that the results obtained by this approach are significantly better than any single algorithm or the scheduler alone. This approach has been successfully implemented in an industrial scheduling system.