Generalized Reactive Manufacturing System

Generalized reactive manufacturing system named GRMS is introduced. GRMS is a human-centered system based on Multi-agent. Its management and control organization is made up of three types of agents named device agent, task agent and shop-floor agent. GRMS adopts a top-down and bottom-up competition and cooperation strategy based on the dynamic sifter and funnel . To constrain the behavior of agents, a reward and penalty policy is introduced into the system and the closed-loop adjustment of GRMS is realized through such policy. Agents for the same task should be cooperated with each other and agents for different tasks should compete for survival in the dynamic changing environment. A distributed-hierarchical architecture with three levels of master-slave relationships among agents are proposed. Self-propelled process planning is also discussed. In order to evaluate GRMS, a time-driven simulation system-GRMOSS is developed to check the physical consistency of GRMS.