Abstract
New generations of manufacturing systems have been strongly influenced by the miniaturisation revolution in the design and development of new short-lifecycle products. Multi-agent systems (MAS) and holonic manufacturing systems (HMS) are enabling the vision of the plug & play factory and paving the way for future autonomous production systems that address rightly the above trends. This chapter reviews the implementations of agent-based manufacturing systems and identifies the lack of engineering tools as a technological gap for widespread industrial adoption of the paradigm. One of the current challenges for the design and implementation of intelligent agents is the simulation and visualisation of the agent societies. This issue is significant as long as the software agent is embedded into a mechatronic device or machine resulting in a physical intelligent agent with 3D-mechanical restrictions. These mechanical restrictions must be considered in the negotiations among agents in order to co-ordinate the execution of physical operations. This chapter presents an engineering framework that contributes towards overcoming the identified technology gap. This framework consists of a comprehensive set of software tools that facilitate the creation, simulation and visualisation of agent societies. The documented research describes the methodology for the 3D representation of individual physical agents, the related identified objects present in the interaction protocols and the assembly features and clustering algorithms.
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Lastra, J., Insaurralde, C., Colombo, A. (2009). Agent-based Control for Desktop Assembly Factories. In: Wang, L., Nee, A. (eds) Collaborative Design and Planning for Digital Manufacturing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-287-0_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-287-0_11
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