DISTRIBUTED TOOL SHARING IN FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS

We present a distributed approach to tool management in flexible manuf acturing systems (FMS), Tool sharing among cells in FMS enables greate r utilization of tool resources, but requires greater coordination of tool use by different cells, especially when tooling requirements chan ge unexpectedly. We discuss how concepts from distributed artificial i ntelligence (DAI) such as negotiation can provide solution methods. In particular, we propose polite methods by which an agent can solve suc h a problem through negotiation with other agents. We present simulati on results for a tool scheduling problem in which polite tool sharing is used for handling unexpected ''rush'' jobs.