Abstract
The food production industry faces the complex challenge of scheduling both production and hygiene tasks. Scheduling is typically done manually. Inefficiencies in scheduling can be costly, adding to challenges already faced due to increasing costs of raw materials/energy and the increasingly strict regulations that factories must adhere to. This paper presents the initial findings of a survey, conducted to learn more about the hygiene tasks within the industry and to inform research on how multi-agent task allocation (MATA) methodologies could automate and improve the scheduling of hygiene tasks. A simulation of a heterogeneous human workforce within a factory environment is presented. This work evaluates experimentally strategies for applying market-based mechanisms, in particular Sequential Single Item (SSI) auctions, to the problem of allocation hygiene tasks to a heterogeneous workforce.
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Owen, A., Harman, H., Sklar, E.I. (2022). Towards the Application of Multi-Agent Task Allocation to Hygiene Tasks in the Food Production Industry. In: González-Briones, A., et al. Highlights in Practical Applications of Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Complex Systems Simulation. The PAAMS Collection. PAAMS 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1678. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18697-4_1
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