Dynamic assembly sequences-a multi-agent control system

Assembly sequence generation constitutes a sensitive manufacturing phase resulting in the conditioning of all production organisation. Usually a static choice of the “best” route is made from the set of admissible routings for a product. The basic idea of the study is to keep all the information supplied by the multiple sequences and to make a choice in real-time according to the actual state of the shop floor. The objective is to obtain reactivity and flexibility improvement and effective assembly operation parallelism. A multiple assembly sequence model is proposed together with an agent based control system exploiting this information. Experimentation shows the feasibility of the dynamic system, and also its efficiency and non-expensive implementation