Transactional Agents: a Robust Approach for Scheduling Orders in a Competitive Just-in-time Manufacturing Environment

Globalization and outsourcing make the concept of Just-In-Time manufacturing a very attractive solution for cutting production costs and bringing new products to the market as early as possible. However, this has a deep impact on traditional production planning. Time-slots at the appropriate production units must be allocated for each manufacturing stage of a product. This reservation occurs in a new environment, in which every production order competes for the best slots at the production units available in a huge open market. By representing the production orders and the production units as agents, we present an approach for solving the distributed scheduling problem between these competitive agents. Using our agent implementation framework, which is based on an extension of classical database transactions, we guarantee the robustness of the whole Multi-Agent System.