Implementing a contract-based multi-agent approach for shop floor agility

Abstract

This paper describes implementation approaches for a multi-agent shop floor control architecture supported by cooperation contracts and designed to support agile manufacturing. The architecture being proposed is based on the concepts of cluster, consortium, manufacturing components, manufacturing resource agent, agent machine interface, and contracts, which are used to govern the skills brought to the consortium or cluster. The basic architecture for each agent is indicated and analysed as well as the knowledge model and ontologies used. Finally the development environment is presented and some practical results are shown.