A RFID Based Agile Manufacturing Planning and Control System

Abstract

In today’s manufacturing enterprise, the performance of customer service level (e.g., short ordering-to-delivery time, low price) is highly dependent on the effectiveness of its manufacturing planning and control system (MPCS). Currently, RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) technology has been applied to enhance the visibility, accountability, trackability and traceability of manufacturing system due to its characteristics such as active, long-distance reading, and non-line-of-sight. Although RFID allows the accurate and detailed manufacturing information (e.g., raw material, WIP, products in factory and products in the down streams) of products to be followed in real time basis, it is difficult to support a rapid decision-making in a distributed and heterogeneous manufacturing environment. On the contrary, a multi-agent approach may be applied in a distributed and autonomous system which allows negotiation-based decision making.Therefore, the objective of this research is to study the application of RFID technique and multi-agent system (MAS) in developing an agent-based agile manufacturing planning and control system (AMPCS) to respond to the dynamically changing manufacturing activities and exceptions. In AMPCS, RFID-based manufacturing control (R-MC) module plays the role of controlling manufacturing system by production and operations schedule generated from agent-based advanced manufacturing planning (AMP) module and evaluated from Performance analysis (PA) module. The development of an AMPCS for an automated manufacturing cell demonstrates that the integration of RFID technique and MAS in developing an agile manufacturing planning and control system can really possess the characteristics of visibility, accountability, trackability, responsiveness, and flexibility in a distributed and dynamic manufacturing system. abstract environment.KeywordsRFIDMulti-agentManufacturing Planning and Control