Agent-based Collaborative Simulation Architecture for Distributed Manufacturing Systems

분산 생산 시스템을 위한 에이전트 기반의 협업 시뮬레이션 체계

Maintaining agility and responsiveness m designing and manufacturing activities are the key issues for manufacturing companies to cope with global competition. Distributed design and control systems are regarded as an efficient solution for agility and responsiveness. However, distributed nature of a manufacturing system complicates production activities such as design, simulation, scheduling, and execution control. Especially, existing simulation systems have limited external integration capabilities, which make it difficult to implement complex control mechanisms for the distributed manufacturing systems. Moreover, integration and coupling of heterogeneous components and models are commonly required for the simulation of complex distributed systems. In this paper, a collaborative and adaptive simulation architecture is proposed as an open framework for simulation and analysis of the distributed manufacturing enterprises. By incorporating agents with their distributed characteristics of autonomy, intelligence, and goal-driven behavior, the proposed agent-based simulation architecture can be easily adapted to support the agile and distributed manufacturing systems. The architecture supports the coordination and cooperation relations, and provides a communication middleware among the participants in simulation.