Author(s)

T. Daouas, K. Ghedira & J.P. Muller

Abstract

The flow shop scheduling problem consists, according to a certain number of criteria, in finding the best possible allocation of n jobs on m resources, so that operations of every job must be processed on all resources in a unique order. Because of its highly combinatorial aspect, this scheduling procedure has been widely studied in the literature by exact and mostly heuristic methods. The approach, we adopt here to deal with this problem, combines a Multi-Agent system with a stochastic combinatorial optimization tool, the simulated annealing. This paper stresses the efficiency and the optimality of a distributed implementation of this tool compared to a classical one. 1 Introduction Scheduling is very important in manufacturing systems. Because of its NP- Complete aspect, its combinatorial charac

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