AUTONOMOUS DECENTRALIZED SCHEDULING SYSTE M FOR MULTISTAGE PARALLEL-UNIT PRODUCTION PROCESSES

This paper describes an autonomous decentralized scheduling system for the processes consisting of a sequence of production stages, each of which has parallel units. In the proposed system, an individual schedu ling system belonging to each production stage gradually generates a p lausible schedule by repeating the schedule generation and the data ex change among the production stages. In the process of schedule generat ion at each stage, the jobs processed at each unit are also decided bq exchanging the scheduling data among the units in the stage. The resu lts of example problems show that the schedule generated by the propos ed system has almost the same level of performance as the one obtained by the conventional method despite the fact that in the proposed syst em only the local information was used to derive the schedule at each unit.