A Performance Comparison between Efficiency and Pheromone Approaches in Dynamic Manufacturing Scheduling

This chapter proposes an innovative coordination mechanism in manufacturing systems by pheromone approach in a multi-agent architecture environment. A pheromone-based coordination mechanism can reduce the communication among agents and decision-making complexity. The chapter focuses on job shop scheduling problem in cellular manufacturing systems. The principal aim is the evaluation of the performance of the proposed approaches compared with the approaches proposed in the literature (benchmark) in order to evidence the improvements. A simulation environment developed in ARENA® package was used to investigate the influence of several parameters on the manufacturing performance. The proposed approaches are tested in a dynamic environment; the simulation scenarios are character- ized by the following parameters: inter-arrival, machine breakdowns and processing time efficiency. The simulation results highlighted that the performance of the proposed approaches are very competitive to the benchmark.