Safe and Reconfigurable Manufacturing: Safety Aware Multi-Agent Control for Plug & Produce System.

Abstract

Plug & Produce is a concept that is envisioned to revolutionise manufacturing by enabling the seamless integration of machines into production processes without extensive programming, offering increased flexibility, and faster production ramp-up times after reconfiguration. This concept implies a smart and advanced system control architecture typically achieved with Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). In the context of moving towards more human participation in smart manufacturing, the realization of the Plug & Produce concept depends on enabling the safe operation of the manufacturing system which is the focus of this paper. The main challenge to safe operation comes from autonomous decision-making, as agents in the multi-agent system are typically not aware of the risk consequence of their behaviour. Another challenge is the difficulty of perceiving the exact behaviour of the system which leads to the implementation of overly restrictive safety measures. This in turn limits the system’s flexibility and ability to make decisions for efficient production. This paper proposes a method utilizing multi-agent control of Plug & Produce to conduct automatic safety analysis and reason the task allocations to avoid risks. The benefit of this method is it enables generating control actions in compliance with safety requirements during operation. Also, the method eliminates the need for overly restrictive safety measures, this flexibility allows for more effective utilization of equipment while maintaining safety requirements. Illustrated through a manufacturing scenario with two different reconfigurations, safety requirements are proven satisfied by the formal verification of the proposed method using the model checker NuSMV. The formal verification results confirm the benefits of the proposed method.