A game-theory approach for job scheduling in networked manufacturing

Abstract

This paper presents a new kind of scheduling solution for jobs in networked manufacturing environments. The main contributions of this study can be focused on three points: The first is to distinguish the concepts and requirements of job scheduling in the networked manufacturing environment form those in the traditional manufacturing environment. The second is to construct a game-theory mathematical model to deal with this new job scheduling problem. In this presented mathematical model, this new job scheduling problem is formulated as an N-person non-cooperative game with complete information. The players correspond to the jobs submitted, respectively, by related customers and the payoff of each job is defined as its makespan. Each player has a set of strategies which correspond to the feasible geographical distributive machines. Therefore, obtaining the optimal scheduling results is determined by the Nash equilibrium (NE) point of this game. In order to find the NE point, the last point is to design and develop a genetic algorithm (GA)-based solution algorithm to effectively solve this mathematical model. Finally, a numerical example is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach. © 2008 Springer-Verlag London Limited.