Harmony Paradigm In Shop Scheduling Research And The Integration Of Emotion And Intelligence In Multi-Agent System

Shop scheduling is one of the most important fields of production management and automation in manufacturing, and has undergone a timeless challenge for more than half a century. However, the results obtained so far are mainly for specific problems, and the complexities of scheduling problems, together with the lack of systematic thinking, are often neglected by the researchers.Based on Rescher's complexity model, the complexities of shop scheduling were analyzed through both ontological view and epistemological view. And it was pointed out that shop scheduling problems should be studied as complex systems. Intelligence paradigm was observed as the core of scheduling paradigm. And together with intelligence paradigms, the evolving processes and trends of scheduling paradigms were analyzed from the factors of problems, methods, means and resources. It was pointed that the new paradigm should bear research perspectives of being pragmatic, broad integration, simplicity, dividing to conquer and man-machine systems to study the factors of the scheduling paradigm. In the process, with the universal concept of harmony as the center, and Multi-Agent System(MAS) as the carrier, the mechanism combining driving forces of self, communication and environment was proposed from the aspects of individual harmony, group harmony, and environment harmony. Furthermore, the overall structure of the scheduling system was given. And with the support of the three domain architecture and MadKit development platform, the console software and multi-agent software of the scheduling system were analyzed and designed in detail. Thus, the basis of harmony paradigm for scheduling and its supporting system was initially formed.Individual harmony is the cornerstone of scheduling harmony, and in essence means the psychological harmony of the agent, with cognition and emotion harmony as its core. With the compatibility analysis of emotion and rationality, the emotion functions in integration, adaptation, motivity and interaction were studied, and it was pointed out that emotion is an effective mechanism in dealing with scheduling problems. As the emotion functions match well with the scheduling requirements, affective computing, with emotion as its core, is of effectiveness and certain necessity, and has great potential in solving scheduling problems. The functions and roles of emotions in scheduling were discussed. The strategies of endogenesis, relevance and operation in affective computing were committed. The overall structure of the emotion-based shop scheduling system was designed. Based on Sequential Check Theory (SCT), the emotion elicitor for scheduling was built up. And the mode of emotion effect and behavior were analyzed.On above bases, the integration mechanisms of emotion and intellegence of MAS were studied. As to typical static scheduling problems such as job shop scheduling problems and flexible job shop scheduling problems, emotion-based MAS was designed and applied to adapt to the solution process. For dynamic scheduling problem, the Emotion-Grouping Contract Net algorithm was committed. The results verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the studied emotion mechanisms, which as the important compenents of harmony paradigm for scheduling, are worthy of further research.