Potential of a Multi-Agent System Approach for Production Control in Smart Factories

Digitalization and Industry 4.0 allow for the development of new approaches to deal with classic industrial problems, such as production planning and control. In this context, Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are a promising approach to exploit the new technologies in order to achieve improved planning and control performance. This paper applies a MAS approach to control the production in job shop manufacturing systems. Within a simulation study based on a real industrial case, the approach achieved a good performance compared to the standard scheduling approach applied by the considered company.