Heterarchical SFCS??? ?????? ICPL ????????? ?????? ??????

Abstract

This paper deals with the design and development of a real-time integrated communication architecture for heterarchical SFCS(Shop Floor Control System). In autonomous agent-based heterarchical SFCS, each functional unit of parts and resources is equipped with an intelligent controller (agent) that acts as the representative of the entity. The controllers communicate and negotiate with other controllers on a real-time basis through message passing and bidding protocol to achieve mutual agreements for task sharing. ICPL(Integrated Communication Protocol and Language) is proposed for this purpose. ICPL is a language and a protocol for supporting communication among intelligent controllers. Based on the speech act theory, this paper proposes a semantic description for ICPL that associates the description of the cognitive states of controllers with the use of language primitives (message_type). Semantics for the basic set of ICPL messages is described. Eventually, an ICPL-based communication architecture can provide the implementation of the distributed and heterarchical SFCS, and makes the intelligent controller transparent to the negotiation problem.clos