Scheduling for complex manufacturing processes based on multi-agent system

홈 서버와 가정용서비스 로봇, 다양한 Device를 포함하는 홈 네트워크 시스템을 이용하여 가정환경 내에서 발생 가능한 다양하게 분산된 임무들을 수행하는데 있어서 Multi-Agent 시스템을 응용하는 것은 효율적이라고 알려져 있다. 이러한 시스템에서 휴먼 인터페이스와 물리적 서비스 제공의 중추 역할을 하는 것은 바로 지능형 서비스 로봇이다. 따라서, 기존의 Multi Agent System을 응용하여 Multi Agent Robot System을 정의할 수 있다. 가정이라는 'open'된 특성의 환경에서 Multi Agent Robot System이 사용자에게 좀 더 효율적인 서비스를 제공하기 위해서는 존재하는 모든 Agent 간의 유기적인 정보교환과 협력이 필요하다. 이것을 위하여 자율구동하며 사용자에게 물리적 서비스를 제공할 수 있는 다수의 로봇들을 Agent로 정의하고, 로봇 Agent간의 통신과, 로봇 이외의 Agent로써의 역할을 감당할 수 있는 홈 서버 등의 Agent와 로봇 Agent들의 통신을 사용자 interface에 직접 표현할 수 있는 시뮬레이터를 설계, 제시한다. Using home network system including home server, home service robot, a variety of device, it is generally known that application of Multi Agent System for performing variously distributed process that can be occur in home environment, is efficient method. In this system, it is intelligent service robot that a key of human interface and physical service offer Therefore, using application of established multi agent system, we can defined Multi Agent Robot System. In 'open' home environment, between all agent data interaction and cooperation are needed for Multi Agent System offer to user that more efficient service. For this, we focus our attention on define as agent that can autonomic drive and offer to user that physical service robots and, design, suggest the simulator can display that between robot agents communication or between other agents, like home server, and robot agents communication information to user interface.

A multi-agent system consists of several computational entities capable of autonomous actions, called agents, which communicate with each other, and have the ability to coordinate their actions and to cooperate. Multi-agent systems received a great interest and attention over time, as they can be seen as a key enabling technology for complex applications, where distributed and processing of data, autonomy, and high degree of interactions in dynamic environments are required at the same time. Therefore, in view of current and future developments of the digitalization of industrial production cycles promoted by Industry 4.0, multi-agent systems are foreseen to play an increasing role for industrial production management and optimization. Because of barriers represented by large presence of legacy systems, in the steel sector agent-based technology is not widely applied yet, and multi-agent systems applications are very few. On the other hand, steel manufacturing industries are complex and dynamic systems whose production processes held a strategic role in the global economy. During last decades, the steel sector has undergone relevant transformations, especially through the massive digitalization and the innovation introduced by Industry 4.0. A further evolution is foreseen in the incoming years to improve the sustainability of the production cycle by improving energy and resource efficiency. Therefore, steel industries must face several challenges on the path toward the factory of the future. In such context multi-agent systems, through their intrinsic properties, such as autonomy, social abilities, reactivity, proactivity, and mobility, can overcome existing drawbacks and barriers, by increasing flexibility, improving resources efficiency, handling production operations, reacting to unpredicted events, optimizing production processes, and supporting legacy systems. In this paper, some applications of multi-agent systems in steel sector are presented to show the advantages and opportunities of agent-based technology.

When it comes to modeling social life, few paradigms are more suitable than multi-agent systems (MASs). MASs have helped gain a deeper understanding of countless social phenomena (through agent-based social simulation) that were hard to study using analytical approaches. More recently, MASs have evolved into handy assistants to the human users they can act on behalf of. One example of such use of MASs is in implementing virtual enterprises (VEs), i.e. temporary alliances of geographically distributed organizations created in order to exploit a specific business opportunity. Competition, negociation and cooperation mechanisms are usually copresent in the creation and operation of VEs, with individual members being simultaneously autonomous self-interested entities and parts of a larger whole, the benefits of which they are also trying to maximize. In turn, VEs have application areas such as commerce, manufacturing, and tourism, offering important contributions to the universal contemporary strife to obtain customer-driven products while optimizing time, costs, and quality. In this chapter, we aim to review the most important applications of MASs in social sciences, with a focus on VEs as a special case.

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is one of the principal indicators for human health evaluation as well as for further issues in occupational medicine, public health and planning. Certain difficulties to evaluate EIA appear due to, on the one hand, the nature of contaminants and health characteristics, and, on the other, the difficulties found in data processing, such as heterogeneity of the information sources, lack of data quality and need to use numerous data mining methods. The application of multi-agent systems (MAS) to EIA helps operating with distributed decentralized information and generating general decisions and solutions. In order to facilitate the workflow of MAS planning and implementation in decision support systems (DSS) applied to EIA, a generalized multi-agent system technology (MAST) is proposed. This workflow is general enough to enable the related MAS to be used in any application area requiring decision making. We demonstrate that by only changing the domain ontology the MAS is easily oriented towards another problem area. The functional organization and the roles executed in the MAS conform to the logical sequence of the data transformation flow, which include information retrieval and fusion, data pre-processing, data mining and modeling, and simulation and decision making.

Nowadays, the efficiency of multiagent systems in wireless sensor networks prompts the researchers to use these emerging mobile software packets in different simulated approaches or real-world applications. Heterogeneous and distributed wireless sensor networks could be integrated with the multiagent systems to map the real-world challenges into the artificial intelligence world. The multiagent systems have been applied from simulated approaches like object detection/tracking, healthcare, control/assistant, and security systems to real-world applications, including medical/human-care systems and unmanned aerial vehicles. Furthermore, the integration of wireless sensor networks with multiagent systems have emerged novel application, which is known as mobile robots. However, the extensive use of mobile agents in wireless sensor networks has posed different challenges for researchers, including security, resource, and timing limitation. In this work, we review recent simulated approaches and real-world applications of multiagent systems in wireless sensor networks, in which a set of common factors about the things that have been studied are extracted and compared to analyze the performance of mobile agent–based systems in the wireless sensor networks, as well. This analysis provides new research directions about multiagent systems in wireless sensor networks for interested researchers. Finally, a novel framework for dealing with the challenges of multiagent-based applications in the wireless sensor networks which have been mentioned is suggested.

A microgrid can be defined as a grid of interconnected distributed energy resources, loads and energy storage systems. In microgrid systems containing renewable energy resources, the coordinated operation of distributed generation units is important to ensure the stability of the microgrid. A microgrid needs a successful control scheme to achieve its design goals. Undesirable situations such as distorted voltage profile and frequency fluctuations are significantly reduced by installing the appropriate hardware such as energy storage systems, and control strategies. The multi-agent system is one of the approaches used to control microgrids. The application of multi-agent systems in electric power systems is becoming popular because of their inherent benefits such as autonomy, responsiveness, and social ability. This study provides an overview of the agent concept and multi-agent systems, as well as reviews of recent research studies on multi-agent systems’ application in microgrid control systems. In addition, a multi-agent-based controller and energy management system design is proposed for the DC microgrid in the study. The designed microgrid is composed of a photovoltaic system consisting of 30 series-connected PV modules, a wind turbine, a synchronous generator, a battery-based energy storage system, critical and non-critical DC loads, the grid and the control system. The microgrid is controlled by the designed multi-agent-based controller. The proposed multi-agent-based controller has a distributed generation agent, battery agent, load agent and grid agent. The roles of each agent and communication among the agents are designed properly and coordinated to achieve control goals, which basically are the DC bus voltage quality and system stability. The designed microgrid and proposed multi-agent-based controller are tested for two different scenarios, and the performance of the controller has been verified with MATLAB/Simulink simulations. The simulation results show that the proposed controller provides constant DC voltage for any operation condition. Additionally, the system stability is ensured with the proposed controller for variable renewable generation and variable load conditions.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) represent a distributed computing paradigm well suited to tackle today’s challenges in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT). Both share many similarities such as the interconnection of distributed devices and their cooperation. The combination of MAS and IoT would allow the transfer of the experience gained in MAS research to the broader range of IoT applications. The key enabler for utilizing MAS in the IoT is the ability to build large-scale and fault-tolerant MASs since IoT concepts comprise possibly thousands or even millions of devices. However, well known multi-agent platforms (MAP), e. g., Java Agent DE-velopment Framework (JADE), are not able to deal with these challenges. To this aim, we present a cloud-native Multi-Agent Platform (cloneMAP) as a modern MAP based on cloud-computing techniques to enable scalability and fault-tolerance. A microservice architecture is used to implement it in a distributed way utilizing the open-source container orchestration system Kubernetes. Thereby, bottlenecks and single-points of failure are conceptually avoided. A comparison with JADE via relevant performance metrics indicates the massively improved scalability. Furthermore, the implementation of a large-scale use case verifies cloneMAP’s suitability for IoT applications. This leads to the conclusion that cloneMAP extends the range of possible MAS applications and enables the integration with IoT concepts.

The comprehensive and safe application of unmanned surface vessels is certainly one of the biggest challenges currently facing maritime science. Such vessels can be implemented within a wide range of autonomy levels that goes from remote-controlled vessels to fully autonomous vessels in which intelligent vessel systems completely perform all necessary operations. One of the ways to achieve autonomous vessel systems is to implement multi-agent systems that take over all functions performed by the crew in classical manned crew vessels. A vessel is a complex system that conceptually can be considered as a set of interconnected subsystems. Theoretically, the functions of these subsystems could be performed using appropriate multi-agent systems. In this paper we analyzed 24 relevant papers. A review of the current state of implementation of multi-agent systems for performing the functions of unmanned surface vessels is presented.

PurposeThe applications of multi-agent systems (MASs) are considered to be among the most promising paradigms for detailed investigations and reliable problem-solving methods, and MAS applications make it possible for researchers and practitioners to better understand complex systems. Although a number of prior studies have been conducted to address complex issues that arise from construction projects, few studies have summarised the applications and discussed the capacity of MASs from the perspective of construction management. To fill the gap, this paper provides a comprehensive literature review of MAS applications from the perspective of construction management.Design/methodology/approachWeb of Science and Scopus are the most commonly used international databases in conducting the literature reviews. A total of 86 relevant papers published in SCI-Expanded, SSCI and Ei Compendex journals related to the application of MASs from the perspective of construction management are selected to be analysed and discussed in this paper.FindingsBased on the 86 collected publications, the utilisations of MASs to support the management of the supply chain and the improvement of project performance are identified from the perspective of construction management, the characteristics and barriers of current MAS applications are analysed, a framework for developing agent-based models to address complex problems is proposed, and future research directions of MAS applications are discussed.Originality/valueThis review can serve as a useful reference for scholars to enhance their understanding of the current research and guide future research on MASs. The proposed framework can help build agent-based models to address complex problems in construction management.

Pricing and prioritizing the Internet access can be one of the potential measures to improve the efficiency of the Internet utilization and control the Internet congestion. In order to meet a diversity of user access requirements, the IP (Internet Protocol) routers can provide users with various priority service classes. This paper explores the application of multi-agent systems (MAS) in the implementation of rational IP routers on the priced Internet. The negotiation model for task decomposition and allocation, and the payment model are described. The strategies of achieving a more optimal global-level resource allocation and a rational and fair local-level resource allocation and scheduling for tasks with different priority are proposed. The strategies for price setting and adjustment are discussed. The consumer strategy is also addressed.

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of some possibilities to apply Multi Agent Systems to support Communities of Practice. Firstly, we present some basic issues on Communities of Practice including a definition, a couple of cases and the concepts of identities, trajectories and multi-membership Then, we analyze the adequacy of the Multi Agent Systems technology to support Communities of Practice. After this, we show how some characteristics of Communities of Practice can suggest different applications of Multi Agent Systems. Finally, we explore one of the identified possibilities, more specifically the one related with a member's trajectory into and inside a community.

The scope of application of multi-agent systems in the process industry: three case studies

Owing to the diversity of green evaluation index and multiple-factor related to the process evaluation, existing green evaluation of manufacturing process lacks a set of effective knowledge management model. It leads to the high cost and inefficiency of analysis and evaluation process. A green evaluation model for manufacturing process based on multi agent is presented. Based on the model, green evaluation support system of manufacturing process based on multi agent is developed with the knowledge base introduced. The implementation strategy of green evaluation for manufacturing process is implemented by the closed-loop knowledge chain, which is composed of knowledge mining, knowledge transferring, knowledge application and knowledge feedback. The feasibility of this system is verified by an instance of the valve stem manufacturing process in a valve factory.

The common access to the broadband Internet allows small and medium enterprises (SME) simpler participation in various supply chains [3]. However the main problem still is lack of consistency between processes which are undertaken by various supply chain participants. The aim of this paper is to propose the concept of broader cooperation between manufacturing companies based on semantic web and multi-agent system. The background of this paper refers to previous experiences of the authors by implementation of the CORELOG project. It promotes cooperation in logistics services among manufacturing companies located in the Bologna metropolitan area in order to increase companies’ competitiveness as well as environmental sustainability through the rationalization of the logistics processes. The application of semantic web and multi-agent system in the above mentioned project allows the efficient automatic data collection about logistics services providers and their resources, as presented in the Internet.

Distributed average consensus finds extensive applications in multi-agent systems where a group of agents are required to agree upon a common value. Motivated by the need to conserve energy for large-scale multi-agent systems, we propose an infrequent communication scheme that allows the system to reach average consensus at low energy consumption. The proposed scheme divides the original large network into two smaller sub-networks with some overlapping nodes. Agents in the two sub-networks take turns to broadcast and update their local estimates, until reaching consensus. We prove that the proposed scheme guarantees asymptotic convergence when both subnetworks are connected and have overlapping nodes. Simulations corroborate the energy saving capability of the proposed scheme.