Pheromone based emergent shop floor control system for flexible flow shops

New approaches for the development of shop floor control systems are needed to introduce better response to unanticipated disturbance situations and a better handling of ‘reconfiguration’ in production environments. In this paper, a development approach for agent-based shop floor control systems is presented, that uses co-ordination concepts as observable in insect colonies. In this scheme, agents operate within an information distribution environment, where information is made available in the form of ‘artificial pheromones’. Pheromone concepts from insect colonies and their mapping into a control system architecture are presented, a test bed implementation is discussed.