Emergent Chaotic Behaviour in Agent Based Manufacturing Systems

In this paper the concept of emergent behaviour in manufacturing multi-agent based systems is briefly introduced, and tools used in the characterization of chaotic systems are discussed. Considering a simple multi-agent model in use in a distributed flexible manufacturing project, we investigate how its dynamical behaviour strongly depends on some parameters inherent to the agent´s negotiation rules. We show that, depending on the values of these parameters, chaotic dynamics may occur.