The product as an active element of distributed production control

摘要

This paper presents a new approach to the control of manufacturing systems which allows increased reactivity and flexibility. This approach is based on a social approach with a totally decentralized architecture. The manufacturing system is made up of a set of autonomous and intelligent agents as in a society. The original contribution of this paper is to consider the product as an actor who takes a part in the decisions. The products are likened to customers and the resources to service providers. Each product is able to communicate and to negotiate with the resources to make appointments for its next operations. These appointments anticipate the workshop behavior in order to reduce as much as possible the waiting time for the products and the idle time for the resources. The appointments are made on a very short time horizon which allows good estimation of resource availability.