The challenges of current and future manufacturing suggest that manufacturers will need to be more flexible and responsive if they are to thrive. Reconfigurable manufacturing systems are seen as one approach that could help with these challenges. However, many issues must be solved if a high degree of reconfigurability is to be achieved. Apart from the physical implementation issues that reconfigurable manufacturing systems present, they create significant issues that make effective scheduling more complex. This paper discusses the major issues of configurable manufacturing systems from a scheduling perspective and describes a scheduler framework that has been developed, using multiple intelligent agents, that is capable of operating in a reconfigurable manufacturing environment. This multi-agent scheduler uses a task-resource heterarchical structure where agents represent the machines and the orders. The agents allocate tasks to machines by using an auction-based negotiation.