Physical Agents and RFID for the implementation of the Shop Floor Control on a Distribution Centre.

Abstract

The application of the multi-agent systems technology for shop-floor control has generated great expectations among professionals and researchers in the last decade. The use of this technology conveys, by the definition of the agents, reactive systems (able to respond to changes), proactive systems (their behavior is oriented towards the achievement of predefined objectives), autonomy, and social skills (consensual decision making), causing the emergence of many initiatives. Unfortunately, most references on this field are mainly concerned with: the definition of agents, statements of intent, simulations or rather ambitious proposals; which prevents industry from adopting this technology. This paper presents an approach to implement the agents in charge of the shop floor control, known as physical agents or holons, on a test bench that represent the installations of an automated distributed center. The concept of holon has been adapted to keep the decision making in the industrial controller. The work is focused on reach an intelligent decision making at the shop floor. For what, two kind of agents have been defined, and the decision makings at shop floor have been modelled by means of Petri Nets. Finally, models have been implemented over programmable logic controllers.

Keywords

• PLCs
• Agentes Físicos
• Control en planta
• RFID
• Redes de Petri