Bio-inspired multi-agent systems for reconfigurable manufacturing systems

The current market’s demand for customization and responsiveness is a major challenge for producing intelligent, adaptive manufacturing systems. The Multi-Agent System (MAS) paradigm offers an alternative way to design this kind of system based on decentralized control using distributed, autonomous agents, thus replacing the traditional centralized control approach. The MAS solutions provide modularity, flexibility and robustness, thus addressing the responsiveness property, but usually do not consider true adaptation and re-configuration. Understanding how, in nature, complex things are performed in a simple and effective way allows us to mimic nature’s insights and develop powerful adaptive systems that able to evolve, thus dealing with the current challenges imposed on manufactur- ing systems. The paper provides an overview of some of the principles found in nature and biology and analyses the effectiveness of bio-inspired methods, which are used to enhance multi-agent systems to solve complex engineering problems, especially in the manufacturing field. An industrial automation case study is used to illustrate a bio-inspired method based on potential fields to dynamically route pallets

A decentralized metaheuristic approach applied to the FMS scheduling problem

La programación de FMS ha sido uno de los temas más populares para los investigadores. Se han entregado varios enfoques para programar los FMS, incluidas las técnicas de simulación y los métodos analíticos. Las metaheurísticas descentralizadas pueden verse como una forma en que la población se divide en varias subpoblaciones, con el objetivo de reducir el tiempo de ejecución y el número de evaluaciones, debido a la separación del espacio de búsqueda. La descentralización es una ruta de investigación prominente en la programación, por lo que el costo de la computación se puede reducir y las soluciones se pueden encontrar más rápido, sin penalizar la función objetivo. En este proyecto, se propone una metaheurística descentralizada en el contexto de un problema de programación flexible del sistema de fabricación. La principal contribución de este proyecto es analizar otros tipos de división del espacio de búsqueda, particularmente aquellos asociados con el diseño físico del FMS. El desempeño del enfoque descentralizado se validará con los puntos de referencia de programación de FMS.FMS scheduling has been one of the most popular topics for researchers. A number of approaches have been delivered to schedule FMSs including simulation techniques and analytical methods. Decentralized metaheuristics can be seen as a way where the population is divided into several subpopulations, aiming to reduce the run time and the numbers of evaluation, due to the separation of the search space. Decentralization is a prominent research path in scheduling so the computing cost can be reduced and solutions can be found faster, without penalizing the objective function. In this project, a decentralized metaheuristic is proposed in the context of a flexible manufacturing system scheduling problem. The main contribution of this project is to analyze other types of search space division, particularly those associated with the physical layout of the FMS. The performance of the decentralized approach will be validated with FMS scheduling benchmarks.Ingeniero (a) IndustrialPregrad

An agent based architecture for material handling systems

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresIn the recent past, market requirements and consequently the production lines changed too. With the customization of products and the growing number of products to produce, the dy-namism and flexibility of the lines are now requirements of extreme importance. A traditional approach indicates great difficulty in satisfying those needs and as such has appeared some proposals in order to solve them. The proposed approaches are mostly related to scheduling and production planning. The transportation system is not usually inserted in the control architecture and system reconfiguration, constantly being put aside in order to this issue. This work proposes architecture to support self-organized transportation system, where it performs control functions and management. The architecture was developed for a system com-prising conveyors where the stations operate. The proposed work is a multi-agent architecture that use Dijkstra’s algorithm to improve the routing of products and materials. The main features of architecture are load balancing pre-sent in conveyors and ability to plug and unplug stations in runtime. The architecture was first tested in a virtual environment in order to check the behavior of the same and was subsequently tested in a real industrial cell in order to demonstrate its use in a real system