MAST: manufacturing agent simulation tool

After a brief introduction to the area of holonic and multi-agent solutions for manufacturing, an agent-based simulation tool for manufacturing systems is presented. Programmed in JAVA and built on top of the JADE agent platform, the tool is designed mainly for the simulations of material handling systems. The user is provided with the agents for basic material handling components as for instance manufacturing-cell, conveyor belt, diverter, AGV etc. Combining these components together in the simulation GUI, various material handling system configurations can be modeled. In the simulation phase, the transportation of discrete entities among manufacturing cells is carried out by agents. The agents cooperate together via message sending using common knowledge ontology developed for material handling domain. Strong emphasis is laid on the failure detection and recovery and the dynamic reconfiguration issues.