Behavior of industrial manufacturing when managed by mult-agent systems

Abstract

The requirements of industrial manufacturing indicate a need for reconfiguration and reprogramming process flow, in order to meet changes in the product with the changing market requirements. The sizes of production lots are getting smaller and the variety of products on the same line has increased. These changes imply changes in the manufacturing process, which in many cases means changing the layout, reprogramming the systems, etc. This makes the preparation time of manufacturing devices an important factor in the formation of the final cost. Devices with more autonomy, able to manage themselves and allow a rapid exchange of features are still to be desired in a manufacturing environment, where conventional systems with centralized scheduling, with defined sequence in the central controller and array of features still fall short. But new solutions must be compared in performance with traditional solutions as there are features that traditional systems are performing well, and that are still on the market. Comparing a solution using multi-agent systems and using a solution centric management on a Programmable Logic Controller can clearly define which metric systems have better performance.

Intelligent Selective Compliance Articulated Robot Arm robot with object recognition in a multi-agent manufacturing system

“…[7][8][9][10] As an illustration, a novel method for the control of a reconfigurable manufacturing systems and its design method based on Petri nets is presented by Silva et al 11 A comparison between management systems focused on PLC and management systems based on multi-agent systems is described by Peixoto et al. 12 An intelligent simulation environment for manufacturing systems is proposed by Ruiz et al 13 Design principles of a multi-agent system for a real-time resource management in an aircraft jet engine's production are illustrated by Shpilevoy et al 14 The key element of a smart factory is the industrial robot. 15 Industrial robots are incorporated in the automatic assembly to minimize the cost and the human errors while the area of the visual inspection has a great impact in the robotic guidance.…”