A Manufacturing Scheduling Complexity Framework and Agent-Based Comparison of Centralized and Distributed Control Approaches

Centralized approaches are often employed to control manufacturing networks in practice. The introduction of industrial cyber-physical systems driven by advances in microcontroller, sensor, and networking technologies is providing distributed control systems with the technical requirements needed to mitigate the drawbacks of centralized control, such as long optimization times that result in long planning horizons and inflexibility. While such distributed control approaches respond to the growing challenges faced by industry in terms of flexibility, resilience, and lot sizes, the inherent myopia of autonomous agents may discourage practical application. In this article, we develop a scheduling complexity framework derived from the literature, which allows researchers and prationers alike to evaluate the suitability of both centralized and distributed control approaches for manufacturing planning and control. This framework utilizes quantifiable environment variables, which influence we study by means of a multiagent discrete event simulation.