Cooperation between smart manufacturing scheduling systems and energy providers: A multi-agent perspective

Abstract

Within the emerging industrial sustainability domain, production efficiency interventions are gaining practical interest since manufacturing plants are facing increasing pressure to reduce their carbon footprint, driven by concerns related to energy costs and climate changes. This work focuses on the challenging issue of energy aware production scheduling and rescheduling systems (EAPSRS). The proposed multi-agent architecture (MA-EAPSRS) is hybrid, combining the predictive and the reactive phase while taking into account sustainability in both parts. It is composed of two cooperating multi-agent systems: the first one represents the smart manufacturing plant and the second one is the smart energy supply plant. It is based on interactions and negotiations between factory schedulers and energy providers. Uncertainties in term of machine’s disruptions and variation of processing time and in term of energy availability are also considered. In order to assess the proposed approach, an illustrative case study addressing the problem is presented and discussed.