Toward Agent Oriented Software Engineering for Distributed Scheduling

Software engineers have derived a progressively better understanding of the complexity characteristics in software. It is now widely recognised that interaction is probably the most important single characteristic of complex software. Agent-based computing can be considered as a new general purpose paradigm for software development, which tends to radically influence the way a software system is conceived and developed, and which calls for new agent specific software engineering approaches. This paper addresses distributed manufacturing scheduling and describes an architecture following Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) guidelines trough specification defined by Ingenias methodology. This architecture is based on a Multi-Agent System (MAS) composed by a set of autonomous agents that cooperates in order to accomplish a good global solution.