Knowledge and agent-based system for decentralised scheduling in manufacturing

The aim of the research paper is to develop algorithms for manufacturers’ agents that would allow them to sequence their own operation plans and to develop a multi-agent infrastructure to allow operation pair agents to cooperatively adjust the timing of manufacturing operations. The scheduling problem consisted of jobs with fixed process plans and of manufacturers collectively offering the necessary operations for the jobs. Manufacturer agents sequenced and pair agents timed each operation as and when required. Timing an operation triggered a cascade of conflicts along the job process plan that other pair agents would pick up on and would take action accordingly. The conventional approach performs conflict resolution in series and manufacturer agents as well as pair agents wait until they are allowed to sequence and time the next operation. The limiting assumption behind that approach was systematically removed, and the proposed approach allowed manufacturers to perform operation scheduling in parallel, cutting down tenfold on the computation time. The multi-agent infrastructure consists of the Protégé knowledge base, the Pellet semantic reasoner and the Workflows and Agent Development Environment (WADE). The case studies used were the MT6, MT10 and LA19 job shop scheduling problems; and an industrial use case was provided to give context to the manufacturing environment investigated. Although there were benefits from the decentralised manufacturing system, we noted an optimality loss of 34% on the makespans. However, for scalability, our approach showed good promise

Shop floor data in Industry 4.0: study and design of a Manufacturing Execution System

Industry 4.0 brings with it numerous challenges. However, it is being seen by companies as essential in their ability to adapt to the market and to the demands of consumers. Thus, intending to achieve more flexible and more decentralized production, the acquisition of technologies emerging from this fourth industrial revolution is crucial. This is where information systems will make a difference, as they will enable the cohesion of processes within the company, such as a more streamlined flow of information. This article has as main objective to study and design an Information System with characteristics of a Manufacturing Execution System (MES), following an approach capable to respond to a whole set of key processes on the shop floor, such as addressing the problem of so-called information islands stored in fragmented information sources. This study was conducted in a company belonging to the chemical industry located in the center of Portugal

A Generic Multi-Layer Architecture Based on ROS-JADE Integration for Autonomous Transport Vehicles

The design and operation of manufacturing systems is evolving to adapt to different challenges. One of the most important is the reconfiguration of the manufacturing process in response to context changes (e.g., faulty equipment or urgent orders, among others). In this sense, the Autonomous Transport Vehicle (ATV) plays a key role in building more flexible and decentralized manufacturing systems. Nowadays, robotic frameworks (RFs) are used for developing robotic systems such as ATVs, but they focus on the control of the robotic system itself. However, social abilities are required for performing intelligent interaction (peer-to-peer negotiation and decision-making) among the different and heterogeneous Cyber Physical Production Systems (such as machines, transport systems and other equipment present in the factory) to achieve manufacturing reconfiguration. This work contributes a generic multi-layer architecture that integrates a RF with a Multi-Agent System (MAS) to provide social abilities to ATVs. This architecture has been implemented on ROS and JADE, the most widespread RF and MAS framework, respectively. We believe this to be the first work that addresses the intelligent interaction of transportation systems for flexible manufacturing environments in a holistic form.This work was financed by MINECO/FEDER, UE (grant number DPI2015-68602-R) and by UPV/EHU (grant number PPG17/56)

Production planning process optimization

Produktionsautomationssysteme sind komplexe Systeme mit viele Entitäten (Roboter, Transportsysteme usw.) die mannigfaltig aufeinander einwirken und zusammenspielen um das Ziel einer Produktendfertigung zu ermöglichen. Multiagenten-Systeme basierend auf verteilter Kontrolle sind der praktikabelste Ansatz die ansteigende Kompliziertheit solcher Systeme in den Griff zu bekommen und gleichzeitig eine flexible Anpassung des Produktionsautomationssystems an variable Rahmenbedingungen zu gewährleisten (z.B. Änderung von Produktionsstrassen oder die Koordination von Transportelementen). Für solch kritische Produktionsautomationssysteme ist eine Überprüfung aller Schritte im Entwicklungsprozess erforderlich um ein sicher funktionierendes System zu gewährleisten. Qualitätsmessungen zur Sicherstellung der Korrektheit von Systemelemente stellen bei der Zielerreichung daher einen wichtigen Schritt dar. Die Softwaresimulation des Werkstatt-Systems erlaubt sowohl Leistungsmessung einer Systemkonfiguration als auch schnellere und preiswertere Reaktion auf sich ändernde Voraussetzungen. Hinzu kommt, dass die Softwaresimulation von Produktionsautomationssystemen immer mehr einen praktikable Möglichkeit darstellt, um Produktionsvorgänge zu planen und/oder zu optimieren.Production Automation Systems are complex systems. They typically have many entities like robots, transport systems, etc. that interact in complex ways to provide production automation functions like assembly of products. The increasing complexity of these systems makes central control more and more difficult. Therefore systems with distributed control are areas of intense research such as multi-agent systems. Moreover, changing requirements for production automation systems require better system and model flexibility for e.g. easy-to-change workshop layouts or coordination of transportation elements. Meeting all this tasks makes the design of a production automation system a challenge hard to solve for designers and system engineers. For safety-critical systems like production automation systems, verification is required for all steps in the development process. Testing aims at measuring the quality of executable system elements, especially the validity of a configuration and correctness of calculated results. A particular challenge is measurement of non-functional quality requirements such as system performance before the actual hardware system is built. Software simulation of the workshop system would allow both performance measurement of a configuration and faster, cheaper reaction to changing requirements, however the validity of the simulation has to be assured. On top of this, software simulation of production automation systems can get more and more a sufficient part during the production planning and optimization process

Engineering framework for service-oriented automation systems

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Informática. Universidade do Porto. Faculdade de Engenharia. 201

Smart Manufacturing

This book is a collection of 11 articles that are published in the corresponding Machines Special Issue “Smart Manufacturing”. It represents the quality, breadth and depth of the most updated study in smart manufacturing (SM); in particular, digital technologies are deployed to enhance system smartness by (1) empowering physical resources in production, (2) utilizing virtual and dynamic assets over the Internet to expand system capabilities, (3) supporting data-driven decision-making activities at various domains and levels of businesses, or (4) reconfiguring systems to adapt to changes and uncertainties. System smartness can be evaluated by one or a combination of performance metrics such as degree of automation, cost-effectiveness, leanness, robustness, flexibility, adaptability, sustainability, and resilience. This book features, firstly, the concepts digital triad (DT-II) and Internet of digital triad things (IoDTT), proposed to deal with the complexity, dynamics, and scalability of complex systems simultaneously. This book also features a comprehensive survey of the applications of digital technologies in space instruments; a systematic literature search method is used to investigate the impact of product design and innovation on the development of space instruments. In addition, the survey provides important information and critical considerations for using cutting edge digital technologies in designing and manufacturing space instruments

Role-Based data visualization for Industrial IoT

The competition among manufacturers in the global markets calls for the enhancement of the agility and performance of the production process and the quality of products. As a result, the production systems should be designed in a way to provide decision-makers with visibility and analytics. To fulfill these objectives, the development of factory information systems in manufacturing industries has been introduced as a practical solution in the past few years. On the other hand, the volume of data generated on the factory floor is rising. To improve the efficiency of manufacturing process, this amount of data should be analyzed by decision-makers. To cope with this challenge, visualization assists decision-makers to gain insight into data. To give a better perspective of collected data to decision-makers, effective visualization techniques should be employed. Adequate data visualization allows the end user to have better understanding of data and make effective decisions faster. Meanwhile, the adoption of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Internet of Things (IoT) as state-of-the-art technologies are among the most prominent trends in industrial automation. IoT technology is expected to generate and collect data from various sensors and devices within the production system, and enables enterprises to have real-time visibility into the flow of production process. Moreover, data received from factory floor should be transmitted from back-end side to the front-end side for future analysis. To implement the exchange of data efficiently, the solution should support different communication protocols to make interoperability among heterogeneous devices on shop floor. This study describes an approach for building a role-based visualization of industrial IoT. An extensible architecture was provided by which the future growth of data and emerging new protocols has been anticipated. By using the IoT platform introduced in this thesis, selected KPIs can be monitored by different levels of enterprise. Three prototype IoT dashboards have been implemented for a pilot production line, “Festo didactic training line” located in Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences (SeAMK) and results have been validated