process plan and scheduling integration for networked manufacturing using mobile-agent based approach

Abstract

The network-based manufacturing offers various advantages in current competitive atmosphere by way to reduce the short manufacturing cycle time and to maintain the production flexibility. In this paper, a multi-objective problem whose objectives are to minimize the makespan and maximize the machine utilization for generating feasible process plans of multiple jobs in the context of network-based manufacturing system has been addressed. A mobile agent-based negotiation approach is proposed to the integration of manufacturing functions in a distributed manner, and the fundamental framework to support the functionality of the approach is presented in detail. With the help of an illustrative example along with varied production, environments that include production demand fluctuations are described, and the proposed approach has been validated. Finally, the computational results are analyzed to the benefit of the manufacturer.