Local vs. global coordination control schemes

This paper treats a resource assignment problem in a distributed manufacturing environment. A production process consisting of operations at workstations which are spatially distributed in the plane is to be carried out by a robotic swarm. The members of the swarm represent shared resources of the production process and need to distribute themselves to the workstations in their mission space. A distributed control scheme is proposed which ensures cooperation of robots and thus allocation of resources to workstations. The control law relies only on local available information. It includes some parameters which enable to tune the operating range for allocation. Simulation results are presented which show the performance of the control law.