Multiagent Systems for Manufacturing Control

1 Introduction.- 2 Agent-Based Production Control.- 3 Design Methodologies.- 4 The DACS Methodology for Production Control.- 5 Evaluation of the DACS Methodology.- 6 Conclusion.- Appendix A. Example Characterisations.- A.1 Voting.- A.1.1 The plurality voting protocol.- A.1.2 The Clarke tax protocol.- A.2 Negotiation.- A.2.1 Service-oriented negotiation.- A.2.2 The monotonic concession protocol.- A.2.3 The DECIDE conflict resolution protocol.- A.3 Auctions.- A.3.1 The English auction.- A.3.2 The contract-net protocol.- A.3.3 The continuous double auction.- A.4 Distributed constraint satisfaction.- A.4.1 Asynchronous backtracking search.- A.5 Coalition formation.- A.6 Co-ordination of multi-agent plans.- A.6.1 Partial global planning.- A.6.2 Generalised partial global planning.- A.6.3 Consensus-based distributed planning.- A.7 Application-specific interaction protocols.- A.7.1 Kowest work-in-process control protocol.- A.8 Simple interaction protocols.- A.8.1 Requesting action.- A.9 Social laws.- Appendix B. Industrial Test Case.- B.1 Specification of the production control problem.- B.1.1 Production system.- B.1.2 Production operation conditions.- B.1.3 Control interfaces.- B.1.4 Production goals and requirements.- B.2 Analysis of decision making.- B.2.1 Identification of effectoric decisions.- B.2.2 Identification of decision dependencies.- B.3 Identification of agents.- B.3.1 Improving the decision model.- B.3.2 Clustering of decision tasks.- B.4 Selection of interaction protocols.- B.4.7 Summary.- B.5 Results from the test case.- B.6 Summary of the test case.- Appendix C. Third-Party Reviews.- C.1 Review by Ilka Lehweß-Litzmann.- C.2 Review by Laura Obretin.- C.3 Review by Schneider Electric.- C.4 Review by the DaimlerChrysler.- List of Figures.- List of Tables.-References.