Adaptive Production Control with Negotiating Agents in Modular Assembly Systems

An increasing number of product variants caused by individualization drives industry to develop flexible modular assembly systems. In such systems, automated guided vehicles handle the material transport between decoupled workstations. This enables jobs to be flexibly routed through production, utilizing order and operation flexibility. Order flexibility denotes a partially flexible order of a job's operations, whereas operation flexibility is given, if at least one operation of a job is allocatable to more than one workstation. Managing the given flexibility and coordinating the automated guided vehicles in real production environments requires robust control algorithms. Exploiting the potential of Industry 4.0, this work presents a negotiation-based agent approach by decentralizing the problem: A job release agent defines the points in time and the product types of released jobs. Job routing agents negotiate with workstation agents to schedule their operations by minimizing makespan. Finally, a vehicle agent organizes the transports from workstation to workstation. The agent system has been successfully evaluated and achieved better results than earlier implementations.
QC 20200502