A soft computing approach for task contracting in multi-agent manufacturing control

This paper describes a new task-contracting schema for multi-agent manufacturing control based on soft computing. It aims to apply fuzzy techniques to implement a real-time multi-criteria task-contracting mechanism for part flow control in manufacturing floor. For comparison purposes, the paper also considers other recently proposed evolutionary strategies to adapt and optimize agents' decision parameters to the changing conditions of the manufacturing floor. All the considered approaches are compared on a detailed simulation model of a hypothetical manufacturing system that was recently proposed in literature as benchmark for multi-agent control systems. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V All rights reserved.