Using a distributed knowledge base to coordinate autonomous mobile systems

The autonomy of mobile systems increases constantly. That means that the flexibility of their task execution, their capabilities to handle local conflicts and the usage of their local knowledge increase. The paper shows that because of this autonomy coordination in a factory must be reconsidered and that global coordination is still able to improve the efficiency and the safety of autonomous mobile systems. It suggests a knowledge structure for coordination containing global information which is called section knowledge. This section knowledge helps the mobile systems to coordinate themselves. Furthermore, some agents, using the section knowledge, are introduced which can advise the mobile systems. The section knowledge is stored in the distributed knowledge base, whose features of preventing the section knowledge of becoming a bottleneck are explained.