A Collaborative Framework between a Scheduling System and a Holonic Manufacturing Execution System

Abstract

Abstract. This paper presents developments on a collaborative framework between a centralized manufacturing scheduling system (SS) and a decentralized manufacturing execution system (MES). The paper intends to integrate such systems with the aim of reducing the existing gap between detailed manufacturing scheduling systems and lower level systems, like MESs. Moreover, the framework exploits the benefits of each specialized technology and complements their capabilities in order to collaborate at runtime. The SS is based on constraint programming (CP) technology, while the holonic MES or HMES implements the PROSA reference architecture and applies the delegate multiagent system pattern (D-MAS). The scheduling system generates a good quality schedule, which execution is performed by the HMES. In turn, the HMES requires services from the SS in order to update the schedule. The paper also shows the impact that disruptive events have on the execution performance. Experimental results have shown a trade-off between efficiency and stability metrics.

Pollux: a dynamic hybrid control architecture for flexible job shop systems

“…The authors use pheromone dissemination of stigmergy technology to guide an adequate elements formation after switching. Other examples of bio-inspired mechanisms, namely PROSA and D-MAS, use virtual ants to explore the intentions of future behaviour and guide decisional entities through the decision-making process (Valckenaers et al 2007;Holvoet, Weyns, and Valckenaers 2009;Novas et al 2013). The degree of optimality of bio-inspired approaches is towards-optimal as, while they do not guarantee an optimal solution, they attempt to obtain the best result in a specific metric.…”

A Nervousness Regulator Framework for Dynamic Hybrid Control Architectures

“…In this sense, a D-HCA that avoids the nervousness behaviour must balance the tension of performing sufficient changes for reacting and enhancing the system's performance while maintaining a stable and safe evolution [1,10]. In general, the condition that a system experiences nervousness behaviour is not a negative comportment.…”

Collaborative routing of products using a self-organizing mechatronic agent framework—A simulation study

“…Following the trend in AMHS the emerging architectures are adhering to more distributed and heterarchical models [35]. These models typically rely in structured negotiation/interaction [5,17], normally using the contract net protocol [17], or in bio-inspired principles of self-organization such as the deposition of pheromones or any other indicator leading to an attractiveness field [4,25,36,37] (see [38] for a complete survey on bio-inspired agent-based techniques also featuring the more conventional approaches).…”

“…Each agent in the PROSA architecture then relies in different types of delegation to advertise, search and commit to the utilization of the available resources. This infrastructure has been recently extended to integrate a higher order scheduler that attempts to steer the system towards globally optimal solutions [37].…”

“…The proposed architecture is similar in objectives and purpose to the works detailed in [4,5,17,25,32,33,36,37]. However it is rather different in respect to the approach taken.…”