shopST: Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling with Agent-Based Simulated Trading

Paradigms in modern production are shifting and pose new demands for optimization techniques. The emergence of new, versatile, reconfigurable and networked machines enables flexible manufacturing scenarios which require, in particular, planning and scheduling methods for cyber-physical production systems to be flexible, reasonably fast, and anytime. This paper presents an approach to flexible job-shop manufacturing scheduling with agent-based simulated trading, called shopST. Aspects of real manufacturing scheduling problems form the basis for a physical decomposition of the planning system into agents. The initial schedule created by the agents in shopST through reactive negotiation is successively improved through the exchange of resource binding constraints with an additional market agent. shopST is evaluated in comparison to selected other different solution approaches to flexible job-shop scheduling.