Agent-based FMS control

Future manufacturing systems will be integrated into the networks of distributed resources, and at the same time, such systems will be capable of processing both knowledge and material. It will probably be required that manufacturing systems be agile, flexible, and fault-tolerant. Petri nets (PN) and object-oriented design (OOD) are used together in order to develop the integrated agent-based FMS control system. The flexible manufacturing system (FMS) consists of machines, workstations, and automated material handling system, distributed buffer storage sites and computer-based supervisory control, all which can be modeled as an agent in OOD with PN. This paper introduces the design of an agent-based FMS control system through PNs and evaluates the performance using timed placed Petri nets (TPPN). In order to do so, the agent control design, FMS structure has been evaluated in detail and the agent definitions have been submitted. The system includes the sharing and distribution of tasks among agents and the mentioned structure has been simulated by TPPN. The simulation procedure has been realized through Petri Net 2.0—MATLAB Demo Program [Mahulea CF, Motcovschi MH, Pastravanu O. Department of Automatic Control Industrial Informatics, Technical University “Gh. Asachi” of Iasi, Blvd., Mangeron 53A, 6600 Iasi, Romania, 〈http://www.ac.tuiasi.ro/pntool,pntool@ac.tuiasi.ro〉, 2004.]. Each case is modeled, and then the agent's machine processing time is considered in this program. As for the evaluation of the study, the system performance is assessed through the waiting time of the parts in queue and the task distributions.