Customization and flexible manufacturing capacity using a graphical method applied on a configurable multi-agent system

This article proposes a Plug & Produce and goal-oriented configurable multi-agent system that admits adding and removing resources to balance the manufacturing capacity without doing any digital reconfiguration or reprogramming. To handle that a new part-agent strategy is developed and described. Goals are central in designing autonomous multi-agent systems, possibilities to execute goals in parallel are desirable when the process requirements admit concurrent use of resources. Also, a standardized graphical method, the sequence of goals chart, is proposed to define and visualize parallel and sequential goals independently of available resources. Premanufacturing of wooden houses belongs to one of many manufacturing industries that claim flexible automation systems due to the high degree of customized products and a fluctuating market. A physical Plug & Produce robot-based workstation was built up to verify the flexibility in altering capacity and adoption to product modifications of a house wall section. Further, the simplicity of modifying the proposed configurable multi-agent system was compared to more traditionally designed systems and plain multi-agent systems with superior results. The flexibility is built into the proposed system by default as a part of the concept, simple enough to be handled by existing in-house knowledge within manufacturing companies. © 2022 This work was supported by the Region Västra Götaland (VGR) Dnr. RUN 2018-00476 and the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth ID: 20201948 through the project Tillverka i trä.