A multi-agent architecture for scheduling in platform-based smart manufacturing systems
Yong-kui LIU1(), Xue-song ZHANG2(), Lin ZHANG3(), Fei TAO3(), Li-hui WANG4()
1. Center for Intelligent Manufacturing Systems and Robots, School of Mechano-Electronic Engineering, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China 2. College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China 3. School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China 4. Department of Production Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm 11428, Sweden
During the past years, a number of smart manufacturing concepts have been proposed, such as cloud manufacturing, Industry 4.0, and Industrial Internet. One of their common aims is to optimize the collaborative resource configuration across enterprises by establishing platforms that aggregate distributed resources. In all of these concepts, a complete manufacturing system consists of distributed physical manufacturing systems and a platform containing the virtual manufacturing systems mapped from the physical ones. We call such manufacturing systems platform-based smart manufacturing systems (PSMSs). A PSMS can therefore be regarded as a huge cyber-physical system with the cyber part being the platform and the physical part being the corresponding physical manufacturing system. A significant issue for a PSMS is how to optimally schedule the aggregated resources. Multi-agent technology provides an effective approach for solving this issue. In this paper we propose a multi-agent architecture for scheduling in PSMSs, which consists of a platform-level scheduling multi-agent system (MAS) and an enterpriselevel scheduling MAS. Procedures, characteristics, and requirements of scheduling in PSMSs are presented. A model for scheduling in a PSMS based on the architecture is proposed. A case study is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture and model.
