Emergent Chaotic Behaviour in Agent Based Manufacturing Systems

In this paper the concept of emergent behaviour in manufacturing multi-agent based systems is briefly introduced, and tools used in the characterization of chaotic systems are discussed. Considering a simple multi-agent model in use in a distributed flexible manufacturing project, we investigate how its dynamical behaviour strongly depends on some parameters inherent to the agent's negotiation rules. We show that, depending on the values of these parameters, chaotic dynamics may occur.