Evolutionary adaptation of dispatching agents in heterarchical manufacturing systems

We propose a new approach to job flow adaptive operational control in advanced manufacturing systems. The major feature of the method is the distribution of the control tasks among completely autonomous intelligent agents. Namely, agents are implicitly coordinated by a nature-analogous adaptation mechanism, which continuously tunes the free parameters of the control law of each agent. The proposed approach is effective and reactive to severe disturbances and changes in the manufacturing environment. Simulation experiments illustrate the operational distributed approach and its response to faults.