What-if game simulation in agent-based strategic production planners

In the nowadays highly unstable manufacturing market, companies are faced, on a daily basis, with important strategic decisions, such as “does the company has the necessary capacity to accept a high volume order?” or “what measures need to be implemented if the product demand increases x% a year?”. Decision-makers, i.e. company’s managers, rely on their experience and insights supported by classical tools to take such decisions. Classical mathematical solvers or agent-based systems are typical architectural solutions to implement strategic planning tools to support decision-makers on this important task. Within the ARUM (Adaptive Production Management) project, a hybrid strategic planning tool was specified and developed, combining the optimization features of classical solvers with the flexibility and agility of agent systems. This paper briefly presents such architecture and focuses on the generation of the “what-if game” mechanism to support the generation of more intelligent and dynamic planning solutions.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007- 2013 under grant agreement n° 314056.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Industrial automation based on cyber-physical systems technologies: Prototype implementations and challenges

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is an emergent approach that focuses on the integration of computational applications with physical devices, being designed as a network of interacting cyber and physical elements. CPS control and monitor real-world physical infrastructures and thus is starting having a high impact in industrial automation. As such design, implementation and operation of CPS and management of the resulting automation infrastructure is of key importance for the industry. In this work, an overview of key aspects of industrial CPS, their technologies and emerging directions, as well as challenges for their implementation is presented. Based on the hands-on experiences gathered from four European innovation projects over the last decade (i.e. SOCRADES, IMC-AESOP, GRACE and ARUM), a key challenges have been identified and a prioritization and timeline are pointed out with the aim to increase Technology Readiness Levels and lead to their usage in industrial automation environments.The authors would like to thank for their support the European Commission, and the partners of the EU FP6 SOCRADES (www.socrades.net), EU FP7 GRACE (www.grace-project.org), EU FP7 IMC-AESOP (www.imc-aesop.eu) and EU FP7 ARUM (www.arum-project.eu) projects, for their fruitful support and discussions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio