Coordination of distributed production resources for responsibility-based manufacturing

The strategic motivation for a new flexible production system architecture based on distributed active resources is discussed. The paper concentrates on a novel framework for coordinating these resources in a heterarchical way. Timed Petri net (TPN) descriptions of the responsibility-based production plans are associated with the resources. After an initial stage of mutual communication, positive and negative relations between the individual activities to be performed are established. A set of operators associated with the relations is then used, in a distributed way, to modify the individual plans (TPNs). Cooperative behaviour is achieved by resolving conflicts and by maximizing the use of the system's resources after exploiting positive relations that hold among the plans' activities.