Agent-based production management

Abstract

Due to the requirements of one-of-a-kind production, a separate, all-embracing concept for shipbuilding was evolved. In this concept, the harmonisation of production and its activities with respect to time and content is given priority. Customer orders are handled as projects and the simultaneous production processes, their activities and the resource requirements are harmonised with multi-projects in mind. Considering the involved software-systems concurrent manufacturing, demands a movement from centralised towards increasingly decentralised models of control and action. Our goal is to support decentralised planning entities, each of them equipped with a GIGROS-system. A central challenge is the co-ordination and synchronization of activities within those complex systems. To improve the system according to today's most modern production paradigms, it is being redesigned towards a multi-agent system architecture. Introducing concepts of distributed artificial intelligence, a co-operation of the modules or of several systems can be achieved to yield solutions for the simultaneous, co-operative and decentralised scheduling and resource planning. After a short description of the special requirements of the one-of-a-kind production, the paper will introduce the features of the graphical interactive rough planning system (GIGROS) focusing on the multi-agent approach.