Agent Architecture for Dynamic Job Routing in Holonic Environment Based on the Theory of Constraints

摘要

Holonic Manufacturing Systems have emerged over the last decade as strategy for manufacturing control system design to cope with rapid changes in manufacturing environment. Resource and component agents integrated in a holarchy are proposed in this paper to dynamically perform co-operative job routing using a distributed algorithm based on the theory of constraints. Members of the holarchy negotiate and compromise on the optimal production flow in order to meet commitments made to each other. Being performed in a distributed manner, the architecture can increase the agility and responsiveness of an integrated system. This flexible structure has been implemented in an open agent environment using JADE agent platform. The performance based results of the simulation experiments are presented and discussed in the paper.