• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.17 no.8
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• pp.760-767
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• 2011

The flexibility and evolvability are critical characteristics of modern manufacturing to adapt to changes from products and disturbances in the shop floor. The technologies inspired from biology and nature enable to equip the manufacturing systems with these characteristics. This paper proposes an ant colony inspired autonomous manufacturing system in which the resources on the shop floor are considered as the autonomous entities. Each entity overcomes the disturbance by itself or negotiates with the others. The swarm of cognitive agents with the ant-like pheromone based negotiation mechanism is proposed for controlling the shop floor. The functionality of the developed system is proven on the test bed.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.340-356
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• 2008

The cognitive constraints of the human mind must drive the decisions in architecture and methodology design in order that the systems we build are comprehensible. This paper presents a methodology for the design of time-triggered embedded systems that leads to understandable artifacts. We lift the design process to a higher level of abstractionto the level of computational components that interact solely by the exchange of messages. The time-triggered architecture makes it possible to specify the temporal properties of component interfaces precisely and provides temporally predictable message communication, such that the precise behavior of a large design can be studied in the early phases of a design on the basis of the component interface specifications. This paper shows how the cognitive simplification strategies of abstraction, partitioning and segmentation are supported by the time-triggered architecture and its associated design methodology to construct evolvable embedded systems that can be readily understood and modified.