A demand-driven shop-floor control model for distributed manufacturing systems

摘要

This paper addresses distributed shop-floor control in a highly varying production demand environment. The dynamically changing demand can be characterized in terms of attributes, such as inter-arrival times, processing times, number of job types, arrival pattern of job types, and set-up requirements. The demand attributes are assumed to be externally driven and, therefore, uncontrollable by the system entities or agents. Recognizing that no single distributed auction-based control protocol and decision logic can perform well under all demand environments in a manufacturing system, we present a flexible auction-based shop-floor control system that embodies multiple auction-based control protocols and allows the system to switch between these protocols in response to changes in the demand environment. The evaluation of this auction-based distributed control paradigm is performed using an experimental simulation testbed based on parallel and distributed computing.