Advancing the Performance of Complex Manufacturing Systems Through Agent-Based Production Control

Ever increasing competition is driving the efforts to improve productivity throughout nearly all domains. In the manufacturing context, digitalization of value networks and creation of autonomous, self-optimizing systems – a vision coined ‘Industrie 4.0 – is an approach that promises competitive edge over other players. One field in which this vision could lead to great productivity potentials is order scheduling and sequencing in high variety, high volume manufacturing businesses like the automobile industry. A viable technology to realize the expected gains in productivity are software agents and multi-agent systems, since they provide autonomy, flexibility, adaptiveness, and robustness to unforeseeable events. This paper proposes an agent-based control architecture that enables communication between resources and customer orders within a car body shop, so that they can negotiate the best alternative schedule and order sequence in case of disturbances. The proposed architecture allows improvement of overall production system performance in terms of output, resource utilization, delivery reliability and others. Further, the paper describes the implementation and simulation of the multi-agent system with JADE framework and discusses the simulation results, which show that significant productivity leaps can be achieved.