An agent-based approach for automating the disturbance handling for flexible manufacturing systems

In this paper, an agent-based approach for automating the disturbance handling in flexible manufacturing systems is proposed. This approach builds on a model that captures the environmental context of disturbances to derive their expected impact. Distributed hierarchical optimization is employed to update the generated schedule under consideration of efficiency and stability. The proposed approach has been realized and tested on a model of a real flexible manufacturing system. Test results have shown a very good potential for the proposed approach in automating disturbance handling by keeping small deviations from the original schedule and achieving high efficiency measures with good reactivity.