• Proceedings of the Korean Operations and Management Science Society Conference
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• 1995.04a
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• pp.208-215
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• 1995

Numerous solution methods for scheduling problems such as part dispatching problem, operation sequence problem have been suggested as a means to be embedded in hierarchical or centralized shop floor control. Under the preceding control philosophies, however, response to changes in the shop floor status is quite slow and timely decision is sometimes impossible. Moreover, the control software becomes too large and it is almost impossible to modify the control software when the configuration of the shop floor changes. In agile manufacturing which emerged recently to cope with quick response and easy modifiability when unexpected changes occur, a new control policy is needed. CSCW[Computer Supported Cooperative Work] based shop floor control casts a different view on scheduling problems. Decisions are made locally when requested and useful information is scattered among agents for its efficient use. Adaptation is easy because agents are -'plug compatible or portable. In this paper, scheduling problems occurring under CSCW based shop floor control are identified and characterized. Traditional scheduling problems are reviewed from the CSCW viewpoint. All the control entities involved in the shop floor can be found and used to defined agents. With these entities and CSCW concept, possible scheduling problems are identified.

• 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 Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.150-161
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• 1999

This paper deals with the design and development of a real-time integrated communication architecture for heterarchical SFCS(Shop Floor Control System). In autonomous agent-based heterarchical SFCS, each functional unit of parts and resources is equipped with an intelligent controller (agent) that acts as the representative of the entity. The controllers communicate and negotiate with other controllers on a real-time basis through message passing and bidding protocol to achieve mutual agreements for task sharing. ICPL(Integrated Communication Protocol and Language) is proposed for this purpose. ICPL is a language and a protocol for supporting communication among intelligent controllers. Based on the speech act theory, this paper proposes a semantic description for ICPL that associates the description of the cognitive states of controllers with the use of language primitives (message_type). Semantics for the basic set of ICPL messages is described. Eventually, an ICPL-based communication architecture can provide the implementation of the distributed and heterarchical SFCS, and makes the intelligent controller transparent to the negotiation problem.