Agent-Based Scheduling Mechanism for Semiconductor Manufacturing Systems with Temporal Constraints

This paper addresses a multi-agent based scheduling mechanism for semiconductor manufacturing systems with hard inter-operation temporal constraints. The multi-agent architecture consists of scheduling agents, workcell agents, machine agents, and product agents. A dynamic planning-based approach is adopted for the scheduling mechanism so that dynamic behaviors of the system can be considered. The scheduling agents compute optimal schedules through a bidding mechanism with the workcell agents. The proposed scheduling mechanism uses a temporal constraint set formalism to obtain a feasible schedule in polynomial steps.