A G E N T S
I N P L A N N I N G & S C H E D U
L I N G
Planning
and scheduling are human-scale and are concerned with human
activities (in a time scale it would represent minutes,
hours…). On the other hand, control is
electronic-scale, and is mostly about numerical
calculation, too fast for human supervision. Agents are
applied for control (dealing with data) but ideally would
also be applied for scheduling. Centralisation has evident
advantages for scheduling because it has an overview of
everything that must be scheduled. However, some could
argue that an agent approach is more efficient. The system
can be structured in modules which is safer and easier to
manage. The system could also be geographically distributed
and allow for agents to operate each module. This reduces
the need for communication, and each module can continue to
work during temporary lack of communication. As we have
seen, agents can deal with dynamically changing
structures.