Immunologic Control Framework for Automated Material Handling

An Artificial Immune System (AIS) paradigm, which is an engineering analogue to the human immune system, is adopted to deliver the performance and robustness required by a multi-vehicle based delivery system in an automated warehouse. AIS offers a number of profound features and solutions, including the ability to detect changes, coordinate vehicle activities for goals achievement and adapt to new information encountered, to the control of such distributed material handling systems. By adopting some of these mechanisms of AIS adapted to specify and implement the behaviour of warehouse delivery vehicles, an architecture that defines the control framework is developed. This control framework improves the efficiency of a multi-agent system as demonstrated by computer simulations presented.

[1]  K. Tomita,et al.  Self-reconfigurable modular robot - experiments on reconfiguration and locomotion , 2001, Proceedings 2001 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Expanding the Societal Role of Robotics in the the Next Millennium (Cat. No.01CH37180).

[2]  Ferat Sahin,et al.  AISIMAM – An Artificial immune system based intelligent multi agent model and its application to a mine detection problem , 2002 .

[3]  Hossam Meshref,et al.  Artificial immune systems: application to autonomous agents , 2000, Smc 2000 conference proceedings. 2000 ieee international conference on systems, man and cybernetics. 'cybernetics evolving to systems, humans, organizations, and their complex interactions' (cat. no.0.

[4]  Victor A. Skormin,et al.  Pattern recognition by immunocomputing , 2002, Proceedings of the 2002 Congress on Evolutionary Computation. CEC'02 (Cat. No.02TH8600).

[5]  Surya P. N. Singh,et al.  Immunology-directed methods for distributed robotics: a novel immunity-based architecture for robust control and coordination , 2002, SPIE Optics East.

[6]  John E. Hunt,et al.  An adaptive, distributed learning system based on the immune system , 1995, 1995 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. Intelligent Systems for the 21st Century.

[7]  Catherine Sheehan.  Clinical Immunology: Principles and Laboratory Diagnosis , 1997 .

[8]  Ronald C. Arkin,et al.  Temporal coordination of perceptual algorithms for mobile robot navigation , 1994, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[9]  Eiichi Yoshida,et al.  Reconfiguration planning for a self-assembling modular robot , 2001, Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE International Symposium on Assembly and Task Planning (ISATP2001). Assembly and Disassembly in the Twenty-first Century. (Cat. No.01TH8560).

[10]  Andrew M. Tyrrell,et al.  Immunotronics - novel finite-state-machine architectures with built-in self-test using self-nonself differentiation , 2002, IEEE Trans. Evol. Comput..

[11]  Klaus D. Elgert,et al.  Immunology: Understanding The Immune System , 1996 .

[12]  Dipankar Dasgupta.  An artificial immune system as a multi-agent decision support system , 1998, SMC'98 Conference Proceedings. 1998 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (Cat. No.98CH36218).