Performance comparison and analysis of reactive and planning-based control architectures for manufacturing

Although numerous distributed architectures ranging from hierarchical to non-hierarchical (or heterarchical) have been proposed for the control of manufacturing systems, very little research has focused on quantitative comparisons of these architectures. In this paper, an objective comparison of two architectures, each required to control the same manufacturing cell, is presented. The objective of this work is to gain insight into the behaviour of alternative control architectures that will ultimately be used to determine the best control architecture for a given manufacturing system. In particular, this research focuses on the role of planning horizon in control architecture design to determine whether intelligent control agents should plan ahead or simply react to change in their environment. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.