Intelligent Decision Support and Agent-Based Techniques Applied to Wood Manufacturing

摘要

A rough mill is a manufacturing facility where loads of lumber of approximate dimensions are cut into components of specific sizes, priorities and qualities. By improving the processes in the rough mill, the cost is reduced and the waste of natural material is decreased. In addition, the rough mill scheduling of components on machines on the chop-line is a challenging problem that cannot be solved by traditional methods because the defects in the wood are not known in advance and the wood sizes are approximate and often inaccurate. In this research, a multi-agent system for decision support and simulation is designed, implemented and evaluated. Scheduling algorithms for the rough mill are implemented using constraint satisfaction and heuristic methods.