Hormone Regulation Based Approach for Distributed and On-line Scheduling of Machines and AGVs

Abstract

The scheduling of operations on machines as well as the scheduling of AGVs are essential factors contributing to the efficiency of the overall manufacturing systems. In this Chapter, a hormone regulation-based approach for online scheduling of machines and AGVs within a distributed system is proposed. In a real-time environment, the proposed approach assigns emergent tasks and generates feasible schedules implementing a task allocation approach based on hormonal regulation mechanism. This approach is tested on two scheduling problems. The results from the evaluation show that the proposed approach improves the scheduling quality compared with state-of-the-art on-line and off-line approaches.