An agent-based production control framework for multiple-line collaborative manufacturing

This research focuses on constructing an agent-based collaborative production control framework that is capable of conducting scheduling and dispatching functions among production entities, as well as within them, in a collaborative manufacturing environment. The proposed framework utilizes autonomous agent and weighted functions for distributed decision-making while all agents work in active and collaborative ways to help each other make decisions. This collaborative control framework is capable of realizing and seeking balances among heterogeneous objectives of the production entities within a collaborative manufacturing system. The agents in this control framework were constructed with an object-oriented prospective so that a production entity can join or depart from the control scheme without affecting the rest of the framework. Simple index values, instead of detailed data, were used for information exchange among agents. This can greatly reduce the communication and computation load of the control system and keep detailed production information confidential while the agents in the system could belong to different companies. In this research we created a simulation model of a real-world multi-line elevator manufacturing system as the test bed to evaluate the performance of the proposed control framework. Two other control strategies with different levels of collaboration were applied to the simulation model to compare and evaluate the performances of the proposed control strategy. Results of the simulation show that multiple objectives of the production entities can be realized.