Autonomous Systems for Flexible Manufacturing: Successes and Challenges

Summary form only given. A major trend in manufacturing today is the shift from fixed, mass production to customized, flexible manufacturing. The emergence of the Internet and associated software standards is enabling smart production management in a manufacturing enterprise through the integration of the supply chain and customer demand with manufacturing. Such integration requires manufacturing systems to support information integration standards to establish the links between suppliers and customers, design and support, and the factory and enterprise. Future highly connected and networked manufacturing systems need to be robust and flexible. We will summarize learning from a decade of R&D in multi-agent systems to enable highly distributed, autonomous, efficiently cooperating, and asynchronously communicating units of automation. Multi-agent systems are useful in applications where the number of possible configurations for the equipment and control system are too large to accommodate in traditional programming. We will provide illustrative application examples to highlight the domain for the application of multi-agent systems in manufacturing, and conclude with a summary of challenges for widespread application of such systems for flexible manufacturing.