Emulation of an Agent-Based Recon?gurable Manufacturing Grid
Summary
Agile manufacturing becomes more important to provide high-mix, low-volume production for more customized products. Reducing time to market and up-scaling from R&D is required to meet changing market demand to stay competitive. Grid manufacturing is agile manufacturing paradigm that uses low-cost equipment, so called equiplets. This is based on the paradigms of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems with Agent Technology. Reconfiguring an equiplet will change its capability to adapt based on the manufacturing demand, without downtime of the manufacturing process. An agent-based architecture is presented where autonomous agents coordinate the manufacturing of products through communication. The agents need to handle fluctuations in product demand and disturbance in the manufacturing process. To effectively counter the consequences of disturbances and uncertainties during production, strategies are investigated in a stochastic model. A simulation is built to investigate the currently unexplored aspect of reconfiguration equipment during production. The simulation imitates external events to validate the systems' functionality.