Investigating Ways to Reduce Energy Consumption and Time Through Dynamic Scheduling in a Decentralised Flexible Manufacturing System Using MAS

Abstract

Nowadays, manufacturing companies are facing challenges such as the rising cost of energy consumption and the contribution of energy consumption to environmental problems. However, there is currently limited literature investigating the energy behaviour in flexible manufacturing scheduling scenarios. Therefore, it is essential to find ways to solve energy challenges in order to improve manufacturing. Additionally, today manufacturing systems are getting more complex with more dynamic elements and many unforeseen circumstances that disturb the manufacturing system processes. Despite that, most models in the literature solve the scheduling problem of the manufacturing system in a static way by assuming that all jobs arrive at time zero and machines are always available. This assumption does not reflect real manufacturing and there is a need to have a better scheduling approach for dynamic systems.