A multi-agent based agile manufacturing planning and control system

In today's manufacturing enterprise, the performance of customer service level (e.g., short ordering-to-delivery time, low price) is highly dependent on the effectiveness of its manufacturing planning and control system (MPCS). However, most of the current MPCS, employed the hierarchical planning approach, may have some drawbacks, such as structural rigidity, difficulty of designing a control system, and lack of flexibility. Currently, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology has been applied to enhance the visibility, accountability, track ability and traceability of manufacturing system whenever the accurate and detailed manufacturing information (e.g., raw material, WIP, products in factory and products in the down streams) of products will be followed in real-time basis by RFID technique. In addition, a multi-agent approach may be applied in a distributed and autonomous system which allows negotiation-based decision making. Therefore, the objective of this research is to study the application of RFID technique and multi-agent system (MAS) in developing an agent-based agile manufacturing planning and control system (AMPCS) to respond to the dynamically changing manufacturing activities and exceptions. In AMPCS, RFID-based manufacturing control (R-MC) module plays the role of controlling the manufacturing system in which production items and manufacturing resources attached with RFID tag may actively feedback production status to and receive production and operations schedule from advanced manufacturing planning (AMP) module. In addition, a bidding process and algorithm is developed to generate operations schedule by using the characteristics of MAS. Performance analysis (PA) module is responsible not only for evaluating the scheduling results but also for evaluating the performance of production execution. The development of an AMPCS for an automated manufacturing cell demonstrates that the integration of RFID technique and MAS in developing an agile manufacturing planning and control system can really possess the characteristics of visibility, accountability, track ability, responsiveness, and flexibility in a distributed and dynamic manufacturing system.

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