Machinery Control System using Autonomous Agents

Flexibility will be one of the key features in future manufacturing systems because the environments that surround manufacturing systems are rapidly changing from day to day. To satisfy this requirement, the hierarchical systems used in previous manufacturing systems are not enough because they cannot deal effectively with unexpected situations. Moreover, a lot of software modules have to be modified when a system is rebuilt to meet new requirements. To achieve flexibility in manufacturing systems, the concept of an autonomous decentralized system is useful. We introduce some agents that work autonomously in the system to build autonomous decentralized manufacturing systems. In manufacturing systems using autonomous agents, the basic concept should be based on a target product and on work having some information moving around in the system. To realize this concept, we introduce mobile agents called product agents as data carriers. The product agents have target product-related information involving manufacturing procedures and data. Each product agent selects a target machine to process and moves on processing machines or controllers according to the specific procedures. The product agents act as autonomous entities in the system. To verify our proposed concept and architecture, we developed a prototype system. This system was for the Shape Deposition Manufacturing Laboratory of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. In this paper, we describe our basic concept and the software architecture of our proposed system and explain the prototype system. Then, we include some discussion of our proposed and developed system.