A multi-agent-based agile shop floor control system

The ability of an enterprise to deliver new products quickly and efficiently to market is often the chief determinant of competitive success. The shop floor control system must be an open dynamic system with the capability of adapting and accepting radical unpredictable changes in its structures and industrial practices. This paper presents a new architecture for an agile shop floor control system. The architecture is based on the methodology of multi-agent systems in distributed artificial intelligence (DAI). The multi-agent system has some common characteristics such as: distribution, autonomy, interaction, and openness, which are helpful for transferring traditional architecture to a distributed, cooperative architecture for a shop floor control system. A bidding method based on the required production cost and processing time is also proposed. Using a distributed object-oriented technique, a CORBA-based multi-agent framework for an agile shop floor control system is constructed to integrate all the activity of the shop floor into a distributed intelligent open environment. To implement the framework, a coordination model between agents and behavioural models of some representative agents are established.