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A multi-agent architecture for plug and produce on an industrial assembly platform

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Abstract

Modern manufacturing companies face increased pressures to adapt to shorter product life cycles and the need to reconfigure more frequently their production systems to offer new product variants. This paper proposes a new multi-agent architecture utilising “plug and produce” principles for configuration and reconfiguration of production systems with minimum human intervention. A new decision-making approach for system reconfiguration based on tasks re-allocation is presented using goal driven methods. The application of the proposed architecture is described with a number of architectural views and its deployment is illustrated using a validation scenario implemented on an industrial assembly platform. The proposed methodology provides an innovative application of a multi-agent control environment and architecture with the objective of significantly reducing the time for deployment and ramp-up of small footprint assembly systems.

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Acknowledgments

The reported research has been part of the EU FP7 research project “PRIME” (www.prime-eu.com) the support of which is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Engineering, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK

    Nikolas Antzoulatos, Elkin Castro, Daniele Scrimieri & Svetan Ratchev

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  1. Nikolas Antzoulatos
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Correspondence to Nikolas Antzoulatos.

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Antzoulatos, N., Castro, E., Scrimieri, D. et al. A multi-agent architecture for plug and produce on an industrial assembly platform. Prod. Eng. Res. Devel. 8, 773–781 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11740-014-0571-x

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