AMACOIA: A Multiagent System for Designing Flexible Assembly Lines

AMACOIA (for Approche Multi-Agents pour la COnception d’Installations d’Assemblage) is a tool for designing flexible assembly lines. Its objective is to determine the functional specifications of the constituting equipments (manipulators, fixtures, grippers, conveyors, ...) and the organisational structure (cells, workstations) for the least expensive assembly line able to assemble a product (or a family of products) within the contract cycle time. The design process is implemented by two interacting multi-agent systems. One searches through the assembly sequence space and the other searches through the assembly line space. The resulting assembly line is build by negotiation and self-organisation of the agents. Both multi-agent systems are regulated by simulated annealing to optimise the technological cost of the assembly line.