Multi-Agent Approach Based on Tabu Search for the Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem

This paper proposes a Multi-agent approach based on a tabu search method for solving the flexible Job Shop scheduling problem. The characteristic of the latter problem is that one or several machines can process one operation so that its processing time depends on the machine used. Such a generalization of the classical problem makes it more and more difficult to solve. The objective is to minimize the makespan or the total duration of the schedule. The proposed model is composed of three classes of agents: Job agents and Resource agents which are responsible for the satisfaction of the constraints under their jurisdiction, and an Interface agent containing the tabu search core. Different experimentations have been performed on different benchmarks and results have been presented.