A material handling scheduling system in an agent based environment

Agent based systems has been considered to model and develop better control strategies for manufacturing systems. With the advent of agent based systems in manufacturing, there is a need for material handling to be incorporated into the manufacturing system. Material handling systems when modeled as part of agent based system require new strategies for bidding. This thesis describes a new scheduling strategy based on priority that can be used for scheduling of material handling systems. The proposed priority based material handling rule is used to minimize the maximum delay of the job and also to minimize the mean tardiness. Furthermore this thesis compares the performance of the proposed material handling rule with other heuristic dispatching rules such as Shortest Traveling Time (STT)/Shortest Distance Traveled (SDT), First Come First Serve (FCFS) and Earliest Due Date (EDD).