Optimized and flexible scheduling of AGVs and process machines in Re- manufacturing 4 .0 Systems using multi-agent technology and simultaneous scheduling

Abstract

In remanufacturing processes the condition of the used products is unknown. This leads to many challenges which are special to the domain of remanufacturing and not known from manufacturing. One of these challenges is the stochastic routing of products based on the unknown product conditions. This problem in particular requires a flexible scheduling and control system for the remanufacturing system as well as the intralogistics. The aim of this research is to optimize the scheduling and control of remanufacturing systems considering the flexible material transport by AGVs. Therefore the networking of all resources is organized as an embedded system treating the remanufacturing system as a cyber-physical system in the context of industry 4.0. The scheduling and control of the remanufacturing system will be achieved by a combination of multi-agent technology to deal with unexpected events and the optimization of the schedule by simultaneous scheduling of machines and AGVs. Machine scheduling and transport scheduling have been vastly studied by many researchers, but most of the works address both problems separately. However, these two problems are closely linked and influence each other. By looking at them together, it is possible to achieve an improvement in the overall schedule. In the first step of the research work, the simultaneous scheduling of machines and AGVs has been compared with the currently used sequential scheduling within a simulation study. For this purpose, benchmark instances known in the literature were used. The simulation results show the superiority of the simultaneous scheduling of machines and AGVs