An agent-based algorithm for personnel shift-scheduling and rescheduling in flexible assembly lines

This article is about a multi-agent based algorithm for personnel scheduling and rescheduling in a dynamic environment of a paced multi-product assembly center. The purpose is first to elaborate daily employees?? assignment to workstations so as to minimize the operational costs as well as personnel dissatisfactions; the second is to generate an alternative planning when the first solution has to be rescheduled due to disturbances related to absenteeism. The proposed approach takes into account individual competencies, mobility and preferences of each employee, along with the competency requirements associated with each assembly activity, with respect to both the current master assembly schedule and the line balancing for each product. We use solutions obtained through a simulated annealing algorithm in order to benchmark the performance of the multi-agent approach. Experimental results show that our multi-agent approach can produce high-quality and efficient solutions in a short computational time.