Autonomous Behaviour in Automated Manufacturing Systems

In this paper, a decision-theoretic approach is provided to model the autonomous behaviour among intelligent agents, e.g. machines, in automated manufacturing systems (AMS). The automated manufacturing systems make available agile manu-facturing systems with the characteristic of quick response to the customers’ needs. An autonomous agent can use the decision method to model multi-agent situations and behave rationally based on this decision-theoretic approach. The AMS is constructed in a matrix framework for rule-based controller design. The controller is comprised of inner and outer loops, where the inner loops are decision-free with no shared-resource problems. The outer loops involve shared-resources, parts dispatching, and route selection, and so require a conflict resolution command input,

uc. The decision-making input uc is selected based on an agent-oriented paradigm. This paradigm views the production process in an automated manufacturing facility as distributed among autonomous manufacturing agents. The payoff matrix representation and operations research techniques are used to facilitate the agents’ decision making. This paper shows how the matrices depicting the decision-making situations of manufacturing agents can be arrived at. An example with a reentrant flow system characteristic for semiconductor manufacturing plants is provided.