Runtime Monitoring of Multi-agent Manufacturing Systems for Deadlock Detection Based on Models

There is an increasing demand for the multi-agent systems (MAS) in the automation of manufacturing systems. However, similar to other distributed systems, autonomous agents´ interaction in the automated manufacturing systems (AMS) can potentially lead to runtime behavioral failures including deadlock. Deadlocks can cause major financial consequences by negatively affecting the production cost and time. Therefore, a multi-agent manufacturing system should be monitored against the unwanted emergent behaviors such as deadlocks. In this paper, we propose a monitoring technique for deadlock detection in multi-agent manufacturing system based on the MAS design models. In this technique, the MAS is instrumented with a dedicated communication protocol to use the potential deadlock information derived from the design models to propagate deadlock detection query messages. The technique is able to reduce the message communication overhead among the agents by limiting the number of agents that the deadlock detection query messages should be initiated to.