Agent technology has been considered as an important approach for developing distributed intelligent manufacturing systems. A number of researchers have attempted to apply agent technology to manufacturing enterprise integration, supply chain management, manufacturing planning, scheduling and control, materials handling, and holonic manufacturing systems. This paper gives a brief survey of some related projects in this area, and discusses some key issues in developing agent-based manufacturing systems such as agent technology for enterprise integration and supply chain management, agent encapsulation, system architectures, dynamic system reconfiguration, learning, design and manufacturability assessments, distributed dynamic scheduling, integration of planning and scheduling, concurrent scheduling and execution, factory control structures, potential tools and standards for developing agent-based manufacturing systems. An extensive annotated bibliography is provided.

Agent-Based Systems for Intelligent Manufacturing: A State-of-the-Art Survey

In most real-world environments, scheduling is an ongoing reactive process where the presence of a variety of unexpected disruptions is usually inevitable, and continually forces reconsideration and revision of pre-established schedules. Many of the approaches developed to solve the problem of static scheduling are often impractical in real-world environments, and the near-optimal schedules with respect to the estimated data may become obsolete when they are released to the shop floor. This paper outlines the limitations of the static approaches to scheduling in the presence of real-time information and presents a number of issues that have come up in recent years on dynamic scheduling.

The paper defines the problem of dynamic scheduling and provides a review of the state-of-the-art of currently developing research on dynamic scheduling. The principles of several dynamic scheduling techniques, namely, heuristics, meta-heuristics, multi-agent systems, and other artificial intelligence techniques are described in detail, followed by a discussion and comparison of their potential.

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A survey of dynamic scheduling in manufacturing systems

Applications of agent-based systems in intelligent manufacturing: An updated review ☆

Manufacturing process planning is the process of selecting and sequencing manufacturing processes such that they achieve one or more goals and satisfy a set of domain constraints. Manufacturing scheduling is the process of selecting a process plan and assigning manufacturing resources for specific time periods to the set of manufacturing processes in the plan. It is, in fact, an optimization process by which limited manufacturing resources are allocated over time among parallel and sequential activities. Manufacturing process planning and scheduling are usually considered to be two separate and distinct phases. Traditional optimization approaches to these problems do not consider the constraints of both domains simultaneously and result in suboptimal solutions. Without considering real-time machine workloads and shop floor dynamics, process plans may become suboptimal or even invalid at the time of execution. Therefore, there is a need for the integration of manufacturing process-planning and scheduling systems for generating more realistic and effective plans. After describing the complexity of the manufacturing process-planning and scheduling problems, this paper reviews the research literature on manufacturing process planning, scheduling as well as their integration, particularly on agent-based approaches to these difficult problems. Major issues in these research areas are discussed, and research opportunities and challenges are identified

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Agent-based distributed manufacturing process planning and scheduling: a state-of-the-art survey

This paper surveys the literature in the holonic manufacturing systems area in an attempt to bring together the key issues in the development and applications of holonic systems. A brief introduction presents the characteristics of today’s manufacturing environment and the requirements for next generation manufacturing systems. Then, starting with considerations about the origins of the holonic concept and its first applications in manufacturing, the paper presents the advances made in applying the holonic concept to manufacturing systems area. Several considerations for the development of holonic manufacturing systems and specific holonic system requirements are discussed. As holonic concept is considered a solution for next generation manufacturing systems, there is a significant number of applications and implementations of the holonic concept in manufacturing systems domain. The most important and relevant approaches developed so far are presented. Finally, a short conclusion and future research directions in the area are provided

Development and applications of holonic manufacturing systems: A survey

Optimal path planning and execution for mobile robots using genetic algorithm and adaptive fuzzy-logic control

Describes an intelligent real time cell control architecture for flexible manufacturing systems. This architecture is based on the multi-agent concept of the distributed artificial intelligence. We propose an actor architecture. This multi-agent prototype system involves the following functions: scheduling, dispatching, monitoring and error handling. A new contract protocol for dynamic scheduling is presented. The purpose of this protocol is to dynamically assign operations to the resources of the manufacturing system in order to accomplish the proposed tasks. This protocol is able to deal with exceptions.

Multi-agent system for dynamic scheduling and control in manufacturing cells

This paper describes an intelligent distributed monitoring architecture for flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) based on the multi-agent paradigm. The proposed approach models the FMS by a society of cognitive agents, which monitor a set of heterogeneous resources. These agents have sufficient knowledge for the decision-making and they co-operate together in order to achieve the FMS monitoring functions. The originality of this approach resides in the total distribution of the monitoring functions over the agents and the co-operation of these agents by the contract net protocol for the real-time supervision. These characteristics improve flexibility, extensibility, real-time running, autonomy, fast reaction to faults, and development cost. Experimental results developed in simulation show the feasibility and the potentialities of the proposed multi-agent architecture for distributed monitoring where concepts such us flexibility, co-ordination, reactivity and integration are involved.

Multi-agent architecture for distributed monitoring in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS)

Deals with a multi-agent architecture and a negotiation protocol for the dynamic scheduling of flexible manufacturing systems. The originality of the multi-agent architecture resides in the existence of task agents and resource agents. The multi-contract net protocol proposed, is an innovation with regard to the contract-net protocol due to the way that it makes it possible to negotiate several tasks concurrently, in real time and with more optimal results taking into account uncertainty and conflict situations in the scheduling of operations. The paper, also, stresses the efficiency and the optimality of the distributed implementation.

A multi-contract net protocol for dynamic scheduling in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS)

In this paper, a distributed multi-agent scheduling system (MASS) based on co-operative approach is proposed to solve static and dynamic job shop scheduling problems (JSSP). The proposed system is composed of two kinds of agents, Supervisor agents and Resource agents. The Supervisor agent decomposes JSSP into interrelated sub-problems and the Resource agents co-operate, through a distributed approach of local idle time minimisation, to solve this problem which is known as one of the most difficult NP-hard problems. Computational results are presented to show the efficiency of MASS in static job shop scheduling. Then, a comparison of the computational results between MASS and some common dispatching rules, on dynamic job arrivals, is studied in terms of effectiveness and stability. Finally, the developed system is validated within an illustrative example, to demonstrate the feasibility of MASS.

Brahim Bouzouia

Papers

Optimal path planning and execution for mobile robots using genetic algorithm and adaptive fuzzy-logic control

Multi-agent system for dynamic scheduling and control in manufacturing cells

Multi-agent architecture for distributed monitoring in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS)

A multi-contract net protocol for dynamic scheduling in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS)

Multi-agent job shop scheduling system based on co-operative approach of idle time minimisation