Sandbox for Development of Evolving Manufacturing Control Architectures

Control architectures for manufacturing cover a broad range of categories from hierarchical at one extreme to purely heterarchical on the other spanning a broad variety of solutions, from quasi-heterarchical structures to self-organizing systems. This paper describes an agent-based framework that provides the tools and components for fast implementation and testing of various control structures in a manufacturing environment. Typical components include, for example, a generic agent for encapsulation of machine-level control, a configurable decision process for the agents, hierarchical or heterarchical control frameworks. Use of these predefined components enables rapid prototyping and instantiation of system-level control.