Towards a cooperative knowledge-based control agent for a reconfigurable manufacturing plant

Borgo, Stefano; Cesta, Amedeo; Orlandini, Andrea; Rasconi, Riccardo; Suriano, Marco; Umbrico, Alessandro

doi:10.1109/etfa.2014.7005226

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Moreover, existing knowledge about the internals of the RT Patch extension of the Linux kernel has been leveraged to bring the system towards its worst case behaviour. During the experiments, a custom Modbus TCP slave collected traffic statistics for later analysis, which evidenced a significant performance improvement by limiting the worst-case amount of activation and communication jitter [59].…”

Section: Experiments Results and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The proposed GECKO multi-agent distributed control approach [59] enables autonomous agents to dynamically recognize the working settings, identify their capabilities, and collaborate to control the production and support its reconfiguration [53,55]. The proposed solution is capable of automatically dealing with structural changes in the topology of the plant as well as the capabilities of the transportation modules without affecting the production, so that it is possible to cope with changes in the demand and/or unforeseen events/failures at shop floor level.…”

Section: Conclusion and Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Knowledge Based Modules for Adaptive Distributed Control Systems

Ballarino

Brusaferri

Cesta

et al. 2019

Factories of the Future

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Modern automation systems are asked to provide a step change toward flexibility and reconfigurability to cope with increasing demand for fast changing and highly fragmented production-which is more and more characterising the manufacturing sector. This reflects in the transition from traditional hierarchical and centralised control architecture to adaptive distributed control systems, being the latter capable of exploiting also knowledge-based strategies toward collaborating behaviours. The chapter intends to investigate such topics, by outlining major challenges and proposing a possible approach toward their solution, founded on autonomous, self-declaring, knowledge-based and heterarchically collaborating control modules. The benefits of the proposed approach are discussed and demonstrated in the field of re-manufacturing of electronic components, with specific reference to a pilot plant for the integrated End-Of-Life management of mechatronic products. 4.1 Scientific and Industrial Motivations Since several years, the manufacturing industry has been facing a number of technological and production challenges related to the increasing variability of mix and demand of products driven by a short product life cycle. Nevertheless, the growing industrial demand for increased levels of reconfigurability-having impact both in production process automation, supervision and data collection and aggregation systems-is not properly fulfilled, mainly due to the lack of widely accepted solutions

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Section: Experiments Results and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conclusion and Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowledge Based Modules for Adaptive Distributed Control Systems

Ballarino

Brusaferri

Cesta

et al. 2019

Factories of the Future

Self Cite

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show abstract

“…Changes in the requirements or the used hardware usually entail high software engineering efforts. Systems with reconfigurable capabilities, however, are at the moment very restricted in their expandability [25] and development [37] or they act exclusively in a simulated environment [38]. (D5) Specialized hardware platform : Hardware platforms are highly dependent on the scenarios (e.g., [22,26,39]) and cannot be used for other purposes without serious engineering effort.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multipotent Systems: Combining Planning, Self-Organization, and Reconfiguration in Modular Robot Ensembles

Kosak

Wanninger

Hoffmann

et al. 2018

Sensors

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Mobile multirobot systems play an increasing role in many disciplines. Their capabilities can be used, e.g., to transport workpieces in industrial applications or to support operational forces in search and rescue scenarios, among many others. Depending on the respective application, the hardware design and accompanying software of mobile robots are of various forms, especially for integrating different sensors and actuators. Concerning this design, robots of one system compared to each other can be classified to exclusively be either homogeneous or heterogeneous, both resulting in different system properties. While homogeneously configured systems are known to be robust against failures through redundancy but are highly specialized for specific use cases, heterogeneously designed systems can be used for a broad range of applications but suffer from their specialization, i.e., they can only hardly compensate for the failure of one specialist. Up to now, there has been no known approach aiming to unify the benefits of both these types of system. In this paper, we present our approach to filling this gap by introducing a reference architecture for mobile robots that defines the interplay of all necessary technologies for achieving this goal. We introduce the class of robot systems implementing this architecture as multipotent systems that bring together the benefits of both system classes, enabling homogeneously designed robots to become heterogeneous specialists at runtime. When many of these robots work together, we call the structure of this cooperation an ensemble. To achieve multipotent ensembles, we also integrate reconfigurable and self-descriptive hardware (i.e., sensors and actuators) in this architecture, which can be freely combined to change the capabilities of robots at runtime. Because typically a high degree of autonomy in such systems is a prerequisite for their practical usage, we also present the integration of necessary mechanisms and algorithms for achieving the systems’ multipotency. We already achieved the first results with robots implementing our approach of multipotent systems in real-world experiments as well as in a simulation environment, which we present in this paper.

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“…To address the above issue, a dedicated research initiative has been started, as described in (Borgo et al 2014), to create a knowledge-based control architecture. (Borgo et al 2015) describes an initial sketch of the knowledge and planning control loop.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Planning-Based Architecture for a Reconfigurable Manufacturing System

Borgo¹,

Cesta²,

Orlandini³

et al. 2016

ICAPS

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The paper describes a novel use of planning in Reconfigurable Manufacturing. Authors considered the nodes of a manufacturing plant as individual AI-based agents able to reason on continuously updated representation of their domain model, plan their own actions, and execute them. The paper aims at clarifying the role of planning, its connection with both a goal selection mechanism, and the agent's knowledge. It describes in detail how a planning system has been customized for the task of planning and execution and shows results of a realistic simulation on a manufacturing plant.

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Towards a cooperative knowledge-based control agent for a reconfigurable manufacturing plant

Cited by 6 publications

References 8 publications

Knowledge Based Modules for Adaptive Distributed Control Systems

Knowledge Based Modules for Adaptive Distributed Control Systems

Multipotent Systems: Combining Planning, Self-Organization, and Reconfiguration in Modular Robot Ensembles

A Planning-Based Architecture for a Reconfigurable Manufacturing System

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