Agent Technology in Agile Multiparallel Manufacturing and Product Support

Abstract

The thesis describes the application of agent technology in product manufacturing and product support. Important issues in the requirements of modern production are short time to market, requirement-driven production and low cost small quantity production. To meet these requirements special low cost production platforms have been developed in our research. These reconfigurable platforms are called equiplets. A grid of these equiplets connected by a fast network is capable of producing a variety of different products in parallel. This is what we call multiparallel agile manufacturing. The multi-agent-based software infrastructure is responsible for the agile manufacturing. A product agent is responsible for the production of a single product and equiplet agents will perform the production steps to assemble the product on behalf of the product agent. This concept has many differences with standard mass production. Every product needs its own, possibly unique path along the equiplets. The scheduling is product-based and not batch-based. There is no concept as a general production line, but every product should be transported according to its path along the equiplets. The thesis describes the software architecture of this production system and proposes solutions for path planning, scheduling and product transport during manufacturing. For path planning, software has been developed that generates a route with a minimum of transitions between equiplets. The scheduling is based on scheduling concepts, used in real time operating systems. The transport will be based on automated guided vehicles. The product agent plays an important role in these solutions. At the end of the production phase a product has been made and there is a software entity, the product agent that was responsible for the production, that collected production data during manufacturing. This product agent can play an important role in other phases of the life cycle of a product. The concept of the Internet of Things can be implemented by using this product agent, embedded in the product itself of closely tied to the product and living in cyberspace. Several possibilities and advantages of this approach are proposed and investigated in the thesis. To prove these possibilities, several cases have been studied and actually built as a proof of concept. The third concept proposed in the thesis is the use of a web interface to enable end users to specify and design their products. The system that has been built, can be characterized as the implementation of a manufacturing as a service (MaaS) system. Using equiplets that can perform 3D printing and equiplets that can assemble the printed parts, this creates a new paradigm for automated manufacturing. The agent-based architecture can also be applied to situations where equiplets are replaced by human workers. A proof of concept that covers this situation concludes the thesis.