A machinery control system using mobile agents

Abstract

Flexibility is one of the key features for future manufacturing systems. To satisfy this requirement, we propose a basic concept, that information of a product, for example a procedure to make the product or processed data of the product, is attached to the target work and moving around with the work. We introduced mobile agents which are called Product Agents to realize this concept. The information of the target product is mapped on the Product Agents. Each Product Agent knows the procedure to make a target product, and mores on processing machines or controllers according to the procedure. This system has autonomous decentralized feature. To verify our concept, we developed a prototype system using the proposed architecture. The prototype system was for the Shape Deposition Manufacturing Laboratory of Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. In this paper, we describe our basic concept and software architecture of our proposed system by explaining the prototype system. Then we will show you some evaluations and discussions of our proposed and developed system.