Distributed planning of collaborative production

Collaborative production is viewed in two related dimensions: collaboration among machines to achieve increased reliability, quality and productivity; and collaboration between machines and human supervisors to combine internal and global control information. A structure, combining centralised planning and human-machine integration, is developed for distributed planning of such collaborative production. The centralised planning relies on game-theoretic optimisation techniques supported by knowledge-based rules for coalition formation of cooperating production operations. The product of the centralised planner is a general, common production plan. The feasibility of this model is demonstrated mathematically. If the centralised planner cannot reach a solution, then human input is sought. For integrating the human and machine knowledge to reach effective solutions, a neural network model is demonstrated. A simulation demonstrates that the distributed human and machine inputs can be combined under this framework. Such a distributed planning structure can overcome the major difficulties encountered in computerised production systems that seek full automation.