| Manufacturing is currently undergoing a revolutionary transition with the focus shifting from mass production to mass customization. This trend motivates a new generation of advanced manufacturing systems that can dynamically respond to customer orders and changing production environments. Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS) can be adopted as a framework so that these goals can be achieved.; Our research focus is on efficient and effective scheduling and routing methodologies, which are based on the HMS concept. The scope of this dissertation is to apply our scheduling approach to a model of the rotor shaft manufacturing system which is a part of an induction motor assembly plant. Our approach is based on a quasi-heterarchical control architecture which is a holarchy in the HMS and the Contract-Net based scheduling technique. This scheduling technique, developed in Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI), adopts a multi-agent cooperative problem-solving paradigm based on bidding and negotiation mechanisms to implement production plans as distributed and localized schedules for individual workstations. The performance of our scheduling approach can be evaluated by comparing the statistical measures with two heuristic dispatching rules that are commonly used in industry. |
