Coordination mechanism in real-time scheduling of Virtual Cellular Manufacturing Systems

In recent years, Virtual Cellular Manufacturing Systems, which combine virtual cells to construct new manufacturing systems in response to changing market dynamics, have attracted considerable attention. Especially, the real-time scheduling of Virtual Cellular Manufacturing Systems has been of significant importance. In this article, a hybrid control architecture based on multi-agent technology is introduced to support the coordination mechanism to schedule tasks and resources in real-time. Using the revised resource element approach with the pheromone concept, the real-time scheduling problem is divided into two sub-problems, that is, task ranking and resource load-balancing, which can be solved by explicit and implicit coordination mechanisms, respectively. Finally, the proposed coordination mechanism is proven in illustrative examples to perform more efficiently with reduced processing and holding costs.