Abstract

The scheduling of a job shop production system occurs using models to plan operations for a given period while minimizing the makespan. However, since the resulting mathematical models are computationally demanding, their implementation in the work environment is impractical, a difficulty that increases as the scale problem grows. An alternative approach is to address the problem in a decentralized manner, such that real-time product flow information feeds the control system to minimize the makespan dynamically. This paper presents a product-driven system model that includes an evolutionary algorithm to minimize the makespan of the job shop scheduling problem. A multiagent system simulates the model and produces comparative results for different problem scales with classical models. One hundred two job shop problem instances classified as small, medium, and large scale are evaluated. The results suggest that a product-controlled system produces near-optimal solutions in short periods and improves its performance as the scale of the problem increases. The results corroborate the advantage of using real-time information to optimize a production plan