A Novel Multi-Agent Based Agile Manufacturing Planning and Control System

In the last decades, significant changes in the manufacturing environment have been noticed: moving from a local economy towards a global economy, with markets asking for products with high quality at lower costs, highly customized and with short life cycle. In this environment, the manufacturing enterprises, to avoid the risk to lose competitiveness, search to answer more closely to the customer demands, by improving their flexibility and agility, while maintaining their productivity and quality. Actually, the dynamic response to emergence is becoming a key issue, due to the weak response of the traditional manufacturing systems to unexpected disturbances, mainly because of the rigidity of their control architectures. In these circumstances, the challenge is to develop manufacturing control and scheduling systems that have autonomous and intelligence capabilities, fast adaptability to the environmental changes, higher robustness against the occurrence of disturbances, and is able to be easily integrated with manufacturing resources and legacy systems. Currently, several architectures using emerging concepts and technologies have been proposed, in particular those based on the agent based manufacturing paradigm. Agent technology has been recognized as a promising paradigm for the next generation manufacturing systems. Researchers have even attempted to apply agent technology to manufacturing enterprise integration, enterprise collaboration (including supply chain management and virtual enterprises), manufacturing process planning and scheduling, shop floor control, and to holonic manufacturing as an implementation methodology. This dissertation intends to develop an agile and adaptive manufacturing control and scheduling system for tackling the current requirements imposed in the manufacturing enterprises. In order to meet the objective of this thesis, the following sub goal has been developed; the first sub goal is to study the design and develop a new agent based manufacturing system for a more realistic deployment in factories by taking into consideration both the machine disturbances and customer demand. The proposed agent based manufacturing system uses flexible flow line manufacturing system (UPVC door and window) as its case study and then validates it in the company. The second sub goal of this study with regards to lack of self-organization of the agent based system in the manufacturing system is to improve the self-organization mechanism in the agent-based system by utilizing the ant colony approach. The proposed self-organization mechanism implements the reference architecture (RFID based multi agent manufacturing system) at flexible manufacturing system. The implementation of these kinds of manufacturing system in a real factory is very costly and risky also existing simulation platforms are not efficient enough to cover the implementation schema. Therefore, the last goal of this study is to design and develop an effective simulation platform for an agent based manufacturing system. The proposed simulation platform is explained based on the flexible assembly line company. All proposes systems are implemented in the proposed simulation platform and real scenarios are defined for the validation and verification of the proposed system. The achieved simulation and experimental results show an improvement of in key performance indicators. Keywords: multi agent system, simulation, control and scheduling, agile manufacturing, re-configurability