Evaluation of agent-based manufacturing systems based on a parallel simulator

Recent research in artificial autonomous agents has paved a way to fulfill the requirements of autonomous operations in manufacturing systems in terms of planning, scheduling, control, and processing. Those manufacturing systems are also coined agent-based manufacturing systems (ABMS). However, it still lacks an evaluation tool to judge the performance of a designed ABMS. Hence, an ABMS is difficult to be accepted by users and managers, and is difficult to be realized in the real world. Based on a developed ABMS model, this research develops a simulator on a parallel computer system. The simulator is designed to imitate the changes of the environment by the changes of incoming tasks, and to imitate the internal changes by the resource breakdowns. Besides, the autonomous, communicative, and cooperative behaviors of agents are also developed in the simulators. Cases and scenarios for ABMS are developed to apply in the simulator. The analytical results show that through the simulators, decision-makers can clearly observe the viability of each agent as well as the whole ABMS. Thus, adjustments on the ABMS design can