DIMS: Dynamically Integrated Manufacturing Systems for Agile Manufacturing

EPSRC Funding: £304,647

Abstract:

A recent study of a number of industrial sectors suggests that a major challenge for today’s manufacturing enterprises is how to react rapidly and cost-effectively to dynamic variations in demand patterns and product mix, driven by unpredictable changes in a global market and increasing rates of new product introduction. While the concept of Virtual Enterprise and dynamic supply partnership attempts to address the challenge from a supply-chain point of view, achieving supply responsiveness alone without simultaneous adjustments of an enterprise’s own manufacturing system will not be sufficient.

This project attempts to investigate how to dynamically and cost-effectively optimise, reconfigure, restructure, and control complex manufacturing systems in an integrated manner to cope with dynamic variations in demand patterns across product mixes and increasing rates of new product introduction, and the prospect for the application of autonomous agent technology in this context.

The concept is to represent a reconfigurable integrated manufacturing system with a multi-layer agent-based modelling and simulation architecture, referred to as Autonomous Agent Network (AAN), and to concurrently generate and evaluate alternative scenarios with regard to planning, scheduling, reconfiguration and restructuring using an agent interaction process, referred to as BBS.

The aim of the project is to determine whether multi-agent networks, based on the above concept, would be able to provide the basic infrastructure of such an integrated decision platform to manage the operation and reconfiguration of systems effectively. The applicability of the concept in real-life industrial contexts will be explored.

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