An Approach for the Integration of a Scheduling System and a Multi-Agent Manufacturing Execution System. Towards a Collaborative Framework.

JUAN MATIAS NOVAS; RUDI BAHTIAR; JAN VAN BELLE; PAUL VALCKENAERS

Congreso; 14th IFAC Symposium on Information Control Problems in Manufacturing; 2012

Universidad Politécnica de Bucarest

The paper presents advances in the development of a collaborative framework between a centralized scheduling system (SS) and a decentralized manufacturing execution system (MES). The SS is based on constraint programming (CP) technology, while the MES implements the PROSA reference architecture and applies the delegate multi-agent system pattern (D-MAS). The CP scheduling system generates a good quality global schedule, which in turn is executed by the MES. The framework is intended to develop capabilities to collaborate at runtime, exploiting the benefits of each specialized technology. Moreover, this work aims to show the impact on the execution process performance when an unexpected disruptive event occurs and turns the on-going schedule - as it was originally provided by the SS - into an infeasible one. The experimental results have shown a trade-off between efficiency and stability measures.