Decentralized Job Shop Scheduling by Recursive Propagation Method

A new information exchange method named recursive propagation is proposed in order to solve job shop scheduling problems in decentralized manufacturing systems. Each machine only has to notify the change of its plan to other machines which are directly influenced by the change. The effect of the change in the plan is directly fed back to the machine which notified the change. The change in the plan is notified to all the machines concerned by simple one-to-one communication among the machines, and the influence of the change caused by its action can be reported to the initiator through the same communication path. The proposed method is applied to a 20×10 job shop scheduling problem, and the feasibility of this approach is verified by simulations.