"Control and Dynamic Scheduling in Virtual Organization of Production Resources"
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Ricardo J. Rabelo ;  L.M. Camarinha-Matos
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(kadu@uninova.pt)     (cam@uninova.pt)
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New University of Lisbon and UNINOVA - 2825  Monte da Caparica  -  Portugal<BR>
Telephone : (+ 351 1) 3500230 / 3500224 / 3500200          <BR>
Fax : (+ 351 1) 2957786 / 2941253<BR>

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ABSTRACT<BR>
This article presents an approach for dynamic scheduling to be applied on virtual organization of production resources. Such organization is seen as a production strategy to allow a more balanced utilization of the production resources. A flexible and integrated multi-agent control architecture has been developed to support decentralized scheduling, which is represented by the innovative concept of Consortium : a temporary logical clustering of production resources dynamically created to execute a task. Negotiation is used as the support technique. Since a Consortium is created it can be controlled and evaluated. For dynamic task modelling some CIM-OSA concepts have been used. Finally, some implementation aspects, contributions and problems are discussed.

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KEYWORDS<BR>
Dynamic Scheduling, Negotiation, Multi-agent System, Virtual Flexible
 Manufacturing System, CIM-OSA.