A Multi-Agent Market-Driven Contract Net for Emergent Manufacturing Control

摘要

In traditional Computer-Aided Production Management, it is necessary to choose a control policy for each given product or product family. However, to achieve real reactivity and agility, a control system must have no centralization at any level. Thus, the control policy must emerge from interaction between local entities: hard-chosen policies may be counterproductive because they cannot fit exactly the evolving demand. Market-driven contract nets and multi-agent systems provide a promising distributed architecture that leads a control policy to emerge from local competition between agents. In this paper, we argue that strong implementation choices implicitly constraint the contract net to follow a given policy. To allow the multi-agent system to use the best control policy -and not a frozen existing one- we define an architecture in which agents are independent from any factory object or concept. Thus our distributed system can self-organize without constraints from a physical equivalence between the agents and the production process