Multi-Agent Systems and Bio-Inspired Coordination applied to Manufacturing Industries

Economic globalization has created a market that demands customized and high quality products at low prices to stay competitive. In order to cope with these market requirements, mass customization production systems were developed and they are becoming increasingly an important research topic. Its performance, however, is strongly related to the coordination among agents and the quality of the data to make decisions. Therefore, an efficient multi-agent scheduling for mass customization systems is required. This paper introduces a bio-inspired scheduling based on the well known Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) in order to guarantee a well performance among devices. Looking to provide data to performance analysis and potential of the proposal, a case study of a simulated manufacturing plant using the proposed scheduling strategy is studied.