Distributed Control of Job Shop Manufacturing Systems Through Multiagent Systems

In this project we dealt with the shop floor control problem in job shop manufacturing systems based on multi-agent systems. The application of these techniques to production management  produced an important methodological advance providing intelligent decision support systems. Thus, modern organizations could exploit the benefits of current information technologies and to improve the performance of business organizations.

The increase in efficiency of shop floor control is a very important task within the manufacturing process. As consequence of the growing competitiveness, speed and reliability in product delivery is essential, especially if this has to be done without any influence in cost and quality of the final product.

Shop floor control affects to the good working order of the system as a whole, and hence relatively small improvements could result in very important global savings. We had to keep in mind that the difficulty in the design of these control systems was highest when we faced with flexible job shop configurations. This was due to the computational complexity of operations scheduling in this plant configuration, together with the instability of the conditions in which these systems work.