Open manufacturing control with agile reconfiguring of robot services

The paper describes a new, open control paradigm for discrete, repetitive shop floor production, designed as a solution for agile manufacturing reengineering through (a) multi-agent robot service reconfiguring and (b) implementing the robot service access model (RSAM) in a distributed, semi-heterarchical production planning, scheduling and execution control architecture. This distributed architecture integrates two layers with generic functionalities: (1) Dynamic reconfiguring of the resource (robot-vision) service access model RSAM through a multi-agent system organization; (2) Holonic manufacturing scheduling (robot allocation), control and tracking based on the PROSA holarchy and the Intelligent Product technology — implemented through intelligent embedded devices (acting as Active Holon Entities) which use OpenEmbedded Linux as real-time operating system. Experimental results are reported from production scenarios tested in the two shop-floor platforms of the Laboratories AIP-PRIMECA (University of Valenciennes) and CIMR (University Politehnica of Bucharest) composed by robot-vision workstations.