A distributed multi-agent production planning and scheduling framework for mobile robots

This particularly flexible layout requires the definition and the solution of a complex planning and scheduling problem. In order to minimize production costs, dynamic determination of the number of robots for each production task and the individual robot allocation are needed.

We propose a solution in terms of a two-level decentralized Multi-Agent System (MAS) framework: at the first, production planning level, agents are tasks which compete for robots (resources at this level); at the second, scheduling level, agents are robots which reallocate themselves among different tasks to satisfy the requests coming from the first level. An iterative auction based negotiation protocol is used at the first level while the second level solves a Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) problem through a distributed version of the Hungarian Method.