Knowledge Integration in a Manufacturing Planning Module of a Cognitive Integrated Management Information System

Abstract

One of the important functions of the operation of integrated management information systems, including multi-agent systems, is to properly planning the production. Due to the different production planning strategies (methods) and the company’s limited production capacity, the agents running in the system may generate different versions of the production plans. In other word, agents’ knowledge may differ. The final version may be selected by the system user, however, it should be noted that this is a time-consuming process, and there is a risk of the user choosing the worst version. The better solution is to automatically integrate the agents’ knowledge and to determine one version of the plan presented to the user. The aim of this paper is to develop a consensus algorithm that will allow integrating manufacturing plans generated by different agents, and present one solution (that is very close to these plans, but not necessarily one of them) to user.