Research on Workers Integration in Smart Factories With Multi-Agent Control System

Abstract

In today’s modern manufacturing environments, Multi-Agent Manufacturing System (MAMS) has been a fundamental approach for developing industrial applications that can cope with complexity, uncertainty, and dynamicity. It has become a significant resource for improving smart factories. However, little attention has been paid to integrate human workers into these overall control systems efficiently. This article is intended to take a step forward and propose a human worker integration scheme under MAMS. The multi-skilled feature of workers and the collaboration between workers are considered in this research. First, a Worker Agent (WoA) model with wearable devices is proposed as a critical design building block. After that, based on the conventional hybrid manufacturing control architecture (HyMCA), a WoA integration interface is investigated to implement the MAMS model. Then, a working mechanism of WoA in the task allocation process is studied. After that, a matching algorithm that considers different scenarios between workers and tasks is proposed based on the Hungarian Algorithm and Genetic Algorithm. Finally, program simulations and actual experiments are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the worker integration mechanism proposed in this paper.

Keywords

• Multi-agent manufacturing system
• smart factory
• hybrid manufacturing control architecture
• worker agent