Multi-Agents Architecture for Scheduling and Control of Robotic Manufacturing Systems

This paper presents an innovative Multi-Agent approach related to an advanced real time control of flexible manufacturing systems. The proposed architecture is based on the paradigm of Distributed Intelligence and Multi-Agent Systems. The developed Multi-Agent prototype system integrates the following functions: Scheduling, dispatching, monitoring and error handling. A new negotiation protocol for manufacturing systems is presented in this paper. The purpose of this protocol is to assign dynamic operations to the resources of the Manufacturing System in order to accomplish the proposed tasks. This protocol is able to deal with exceptions.