Decentralized Factory Control based on Multi-Agent Technologies

In recent years, economic changes driven by an increase in consumer and small business demand for highly customised and small-batch products have necessitated a paradigm shift away from traditionally rigid manufacturing towards a more agile and decentralised approach to factory control. Such an approach, by eliminating centralised control, gives rise to factories whose production capabilities can be reconfigured at a moment’s notice in order to respond to high-frequency shifts in production demand. This paper proposes a novel architecture for decentralised factory control based on multi-agent technologies. Unlike the previous research work in this field, this research differs in its being designed from the ground up using open-source software, instead of relying on existing solutions for agent-to-agent communications. The presented architecture allows for real-time production flexibility in response to changes in the factory layout, e.g. machines going offline, or new machines being added. It achieves this with a ping-response system. A piece of software has been developed to simulate the functions of the proposed architecture.