Assessing the potential of decentralised scheduling: An experimental study for the job shop case

Abstract

-Part of special issue: 10th IFAC Conference on Manufacturing Modelling, Management and Control MIM 2022: Nantes, France, 22-24 June 2022. -Copyright © 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.In this paper we investigate how decentralised scheduling approaches can be used to improve manufacturing scheduling. In view of the potential shown by some of these novel decentralised approaches, we conduct a series of experiments on a set of job shop instances subject to different degrees of variability in their processing times, and compare the performance of different scoring methods under the Contract Net Protocol proposed by Guizzi et al. (2019) with the objective of minimizing the expected makespan. We also compare the performance of the optimal (centralised and deterministic) solution in the stochastic setting, as well as a hybrid centralised-decentralised approach. Despite some limitations in the experiments, the results show the excellent performance of the decentralised approach if its operating parameters are optimized, and that the hybrid approach serves to overcome some of the problems of both centralised and decentralised approaches