Quality control agents for adaptive visual inspection in production lines

In the last decade multi-agent systems (MAS) have been thoroughly investigated as a suitable paradigm for process control. Despite the difficulties in designing and maintaining a MAS architecture for real production scenarios, several EU research projects have been financed and many companies are looking at the improvement in the production efficiency of such systems. The EU FP7 GRACE project aims at the integration of process and quality control in a multi-agent environment. This paper discusses the integration of quality control stations into the GRACE MAS. The stations themselves will become autonomous agents, capable of self-reconfiguration according to the needs of the production to improve shop floor efficiency while maintaining the same (and possibly higher) quality level for the manufactured products. Details about the quality control agent behaviour, its integration with the physical hardware and communication with the other agents will be given. All the concepts have been tested in an experimental environment where a vision inspection station behaves as one of the agents of the MAS platform, communicating and exchanging data with the other agents and optimizing its operations over time.