A multi-agent systems approach to collaborative autonomous manufacturing operations

This paper describes a novel agent-based execution architecture for manufacturing. Integral to this architecture is the separation of part processing concerns from manufacturing concerns. Thus we have part agents which are able to issue and track resource-independent part-processing requests. An interface agent then transforms a resource-independent request into one or more resource-dependent requests and dispatches them to the appropriate manufacturing agents. Execution of the dispatched requests then proceeds autonomously, taking into account safety constraints. We also describe an implementation of this architecture targeted for a robotic assembly cell located at the University of Cambridge