Dynamic vehicle routing in distributed manufacturing environments

This paper addresses a resource assignment problem in a distributed manufacturing environment. A robotic swarm representing shared resources of a production process is to be distributed to workstations in its mission space. A distributed control scheme is proposed which ensures cooperation of robots and thus sharing of resources on workstations. Each robot has a limited communication radius. Inside each others communication radius robots are able to exchange available data and therefore coordinate their efforts. The control law relies only on local available information. Simulation results are presented which show the performance of the control law.