A multiagent-based distributed control platform for industrial flexible production systems

The tendency of recent production technologies towards both batches of small/medium size and part families of increasing variety often comes into conflict with the demand for high productivity, i.e. production-time minimization and simultaneous improvement of machine utilization. Flexible production systems possess the ability to attain efficiency and versatility by producing a wide range of different product families with minimal effort in changing the involved manufacturing environment. Nevertheless, the production system´s flexibility and degree of reliability depend fundamentally on the flexibility and reliability of the embedded control system. This paper reports on the design and realization of a multi-agent-based distributed control system for flexible production systems, which covers both conventional control equipment as well as embedded control agents. The agent components are implemented as Windows NT services and logic control programs interfaced via DCOM and an Ethernet. The results of the application in an industrial flexible production system are used to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach