Multi-factory scheduling

Multi-factory scheduling: we classify multi-factory scheduling into two categories, single-agent and multi-agent (Behnamian and Fatemi Ghomi 2012).

 

In the first category, all factories belong to the same company. They cooperatively tried to maximize their central company global objective function(s). They should sacrifice their individual interests to benefit others so that the revenue of the central company as a whole is maximized.

In another category which is also called virtual production network (VPN), there is not
central authority to factories’ management (Archimede et al. 2013). In multi-agent paradigm, a number of different individual small and medium companies joins together to create a production network, in which these companies can operate more economically in such coalition rather than operating individually.