Self-organization of a highly flexible shop floor – From Muti-agent based interactions to an echolocation-inspired automation system

In last decades, novel manufacturing requirements have introduced the need of having higher levels of automation in manufacturing shop-floors. Supervisory and centralized approaches are not able to provide the scalability, modularity and autonomy required in the fourth industrial revolution. Self-organizing ideas from nature are very promising and have not been highly explored in manufacturing automation. The contribution of this paper goes towards that direction. We first define a highly flexible shop-floor and the interaction of the elements is proposed considering a multi-agent based negotiation. From this point, we introduce and define analogies and patterns based on the echolocation of bats that can be applied in manufacturing automation. These patterns are based on the way how bats hunt and avoid obstacles based on the emission of sound and echo perception. These ideas are showcased using the matrix production concept which proofs the feasibility of the current approach. Various conclusions, limitations and potential future works are described at the end of the paper.