Communication Issues in Multi-Agent-Based Plant Automation Scheduling

The current state of the art in production planning is still dominated by largely centralized solutions. More distributed approaches require a substantial increase in communication, and network load becomes an important factor. This paper presents a distributed plant automation approach based on mobile software agents and investigates the network load generated by the agents in terms of communication and migration. Particular emphasis is given to the impact of the planning horizon and prioritization, which leads to extensive rescheduling processes. It appears that scheduling approaches that plan several steps in advance need substantially more communication overhead, but can be made less susceptible to snowball effects associated with rescheduling.