Simulation of manufacturing processes using multi-agent technology
Testing on real equipment is very expensive. Simulation of manufacturing processes helps find out best possible configuration of the production process even if the real equipment doesn’t exist. Extension or reconfiguration of the existing processes can be tested and evaluated before investment takes place. Validation of the plans in the simulated environment can also bring significant benefits. Proposed simulation system makes use of advantages of the agent technologies such as high flexibility and modular architecture, openness and easy reconfiguration. Simulation system allows testing several configurations of production processes and locates bottlenecks or possible problems. Using different planning techniques with different configurations allows adapting the planning algorithms and finding the best plan for the appropriate configuration. All the experimental results can be analytically evaluated and used for improving production processes. On the other hand, real data gathered from the real processes shall be applied back on the simulation model to improve its accuracy.
The time synchronisation agent seams to be very central to your system. Since you are simulating a process and you are trying to uncover
communication problems between the different entities that participate in the process, what would be the effect of a communication problem
between the TSA and the entities you model on the results that you will finaly aquire ? is there a dependency or not & what would be the resulting error?
FIPA [Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents - http://www.FIPA.org] is an IEEE Computer Society standards organization that promotes agent-based technology and the interoperability of its standards with other technologies."
If I can ask a question...
I infer that your use of multi-agent systems is partly to allow for the easy integration of new elements. How complicated can the individual simulated machines be? Is there a good reason that your system is better than Witness?
Hi there.
I'm really new in this agent-based technologies. There are two questions:
a. Could you please briefly explain, what is FIPA and what it can do in this agent technologies?
b. Is there any agent tool technologies available in other than JAVA language? Any of these language are freely available?
Many thanks.