Researchers: Ilya Kovalenko
Present-day manufacturing companies encounter a variety of challenges due to the dynamically changing industrial environment. Current control frameworks lack the adaptability and flexibility to effectively deal with challenges such as broken down machines or altered customer orders. One type of strategy that can be utilized to address these challenges is multi-agent control of manufacturing systems. The multi-agent control strategy consists of a number of agents working together to achieve individual objectives based on their local environment. These agents represent various types of physical (e.g. robot, part, mill, etc.) or cyber (e.g. work order) components present in an industrial environment. By utilizing local information and relying on local interactions, multi-agent control can improve the flexibility and reactivity of manufacturing systems during unexpected events.
Resource Agents Coordination for Multi-Agent Control of Manufacturing System
Researcher: Mingjie Bi
The continually changing industrial environment leads to susceptibility to an unexpected disturbance in manufacturing systems, like broken-down machines. To attenuate the resource disturbance, the multi-agent methodology has been proposed and utilized in manufacturing systems. In this context, a coordination strategy between resource agents (RAs), responsible for high-level control of the physical resource, is being pursued. To make RAs know which RAs they should coordinate with and what information should be passed, an environment model of RAs is provided in this work, including clustering RAs and neighboring RAs. When the resource disturbance happens, the RA which captures the disturbance coordinates with its cluster and then expands the coordination to the clusters of its neighboring RAs. Through the coordination process, a new schedule to finish the job of the disturbed resource could be found, which means the resource disturbance is attenuated.
