Distributed artificial intelligence for FMS scheduling, control and design support

The aim of this paper is to point out some of the abilities of Distributed Artificial Intelligence in the domain of scheduling, control and design support of Flexible Manufacturing Systems. A distributed management system is proposed, based on Distributed Problem Solving, sub-field of Distributed Artificial Intelligence. The basic concepts are the concept of Resource Management Entity to ensure local optimization of the management of resources and the concept of cooperation to provide ability for global and local consistency. The management of resources is associated to activities such as scheduling, control or simulation. It is shown that this system computes not only practicable schedulings, but also presents, on the one hand, some abilities in supporting the design and the robust optimization of Flexible Manufacturing Systems, and, on the other hand, some abilities in supporting real-time control of such systems. This enables, in future works, to design a Distributed Decision Support System for integrated scheduling, control and design support of production systems.