Multiagent technologies for steel production and control

Flexible planning and realisation as well as fast reorganisation after interferences during continuous work are indispensable requirements for a competitive position on the market in the industrial sector. We present an agent-based generic solution for the planning and observation inside the steelwork "Volklingen" of the German steel company "Saarstahl AG", a global respected steel manufacturer. For a given daily target schedule for the steelwork an initial solution - meaning executable schedules for each aggregate inside the steelwork - is obtained by a combined distributed planning and scheduling algorithm in which each aggregate represented as an agent calculates the set of possible solutions locally and a further agent does the optimisation, where the objective function can be altered by a user. The real-time system then monitors the plan execution and recognizes potential faults in the production process as soon as possible and gives suggestions of how to react on these operational faults.