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.