Emergent forecasting using a stigmergy approach in manufacturing coordination and control

This paper presents the design of new manufacturing coordination and control systems based on multi-agent technology. This design aims to cope with a dynamic environment characteristic for manufacturing systems nowadays. One important feature to handle these dynamics is having the ability to plan ahead, thus avoiding problems before they occur. Therefore, one novel characteristic of the system is the ability to perform emergent forecasting. Regarding emergent forecasting, an important issue that rises from this design is how to ensure that the forecast is reliable, and on the other hand, that the system is still fast enough to react against disturbances. This paper elaborates on the agents that form the system, and proposes a way to engineer it. Moreover, this paper also describes emergent forecasting. In addition to that, the trade off between responsiveness and forecast reliability (system nervousness issue) is also discussed in this paper, altogether with an example on the design of social acceptable behaviour that aims to handle the nervousness issue. Finally, some implementation and prototyping results are presented.status: publishe