An agent-based approach to simulate production, degradation, repair, replacement and preventive maintenance of manufacturing systems

The capacity to reconfigure production systems is considered fundamental for today´s factories because of increasing demand for a high-level customer service (in terms of lead time and price). For this reason, the ability to simulate the productivity of a specific production line configuration can be a great assistance to the decision making process. This paper presents a multi-agent model used to simulate the failure behavior of a complex line production. This approach offers a decentralized alternative to designing decision-making system based on the simulation of distributed entities. The model is able to independently manage the variations in production rates and the tendency to fail, caused by the degradation of machines, repair actions, and replacements. In addition, random failures and preventive maintenance on the manufacturing system of a single product were considered. The blackboard system and the contract net protocol have inspired the coordination of the productivity of the different machines in the production line, to simulate the most feasible and balanced productivity for different states of the line.