Agent-Based Manufacturing: Advances in the Holonic Approach PDF
Preview Agent-Based Manufacturing: Advances in the Holonic Approach
Advanced Information Processing Series Editor Lakhmi C. Jain Advisory Board Members Endre Boros Clarence W. de Silva Stephen Grossberg Robert J. Howlett Michael N. Huhns Paul B. Kantor Charles L. Karr Nadia Magenat-Thalmann Dinesh P. Mital Toyoaki Nishida Klaus Obermayer Manfred Schmitt Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg GmbH S. M. Deen (Ed.) Agent-Based Manufacturing Advances in the Holonic Approach With 152 Figures and 17 Tables 1 3 S. M. Deen Department of Computer Science University of Keele Keele Staffs. ST5 5BG UK [email protected] Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek. Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de. ACM Subject Classification (1998): I.2, J.2, J.6 ISBN 978-3-642-07895-8 ISBN 978-3-662-05624-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-662-05624-0 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilm or in any other way, and storage in data banks. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the German Copyright Law of September 9, 1965, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg GmbH . Violations are liable for prosecution under the German Copyright Law. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003 Originally published by Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg New York in 2003 The use of designations, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. Cover Design: KünkelLopka, Heidelberg Typesetting: Computer to film by author´s data Printed on acid-free paper 45/3142YL 5 4 3 2 1 0 Foreword In writing this Foreword, I recall the start of the IMS (Intelligent Manufacturing Sys- tems) programme, founded on international cooperation in research and development in manufacturing technology. I first made the proposal for such an international pro- gramme in informal factory automation meetings in Japan between 1988 and 1989. It called for a change of attitude from a purely competitive stance to one that demanded both disclosure of manufacturing know-how within companies and cooperation to develop the future technologies on a sound basis. There were of course much uncertainty. The demand of disclosure and cooperation goes against the very ethos of a free economy, it weakens the incentives for techno- logical progress, and above all it requires the corporate managers to commit an appar- ent heresy – to disclose manufacturing know-how to the competitors. After much de- bate and deliberation, a decision was taken in 1989 to draft the IMS programme, as a ten-year 150 billion yen venture in the form of an international consortium for re- search and development in manufacturing. The United States and the European coun- tries were invited to participate. At first international discussions were conducted at the inter-company level, but later the Governments of those countries took the view that international joint research in manufacturing technology should be conducted un- der close Government scrutiny. This change of perspective led to many redraftings of the proposal and also to the establishment of many structures to control and guide the programme. Australia, Canada and the EFTA countries also joined in. The programme was launched with a number of projects as a feasibility study in 1993, which was subsequently followed by the full-scale programme. I personally remained in touch with its activities as a member (and rotating chairman) of its Inter- national Steering Committee. Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS), with the objective of low-volume high- variety manufacturing in an agile environment, was one of the original IMS projects in the feasibility study and has remained an important project ever since. The HMS project has been a successful consortium, and I gained some first hand knowledge of its activities when I attended one of its international meetings at Kitakiyushu (Japan) in the year 2000. I was very impressed by the work the members had done and the in- ternational cooperation (which was unthinkable a few years ago) they had achieved. Of the various research and development topics covered internationally in the HMS project, distributed manufacturing provided the general foundation. This book focuses on the aspects of distributed manufacturing where holons, as autonomous units of production, cooperate effectively to manufacture products in a robust, scalable, stable and dynamically reconfigurable environment – with agility, VI Foreword adaptability and flexibility. This is undoubtedly an area of significant new develop- ments in manufacturing science in the 21st Century. I understand that this area is of particular interest also to the researchers and developers in multi-agent systems, where manufacturing applications offer a formidable challenge. The articles in the book address both practical and theoretical issues with many invigorating ideas and approaches, which should provide new inspiration to explore not only the individual agent behaviour, but also the emergent behaviour of multi-agent systems. As implied above, the book presents real-world problems and suggests possible so- lutions, which should stimulate all those researchers and developers interested in multi-agent systems and future manufacturing. I recommend the book to all such per- sons in industry, universities and research centres. Tokyo, Japan H. Yoshikawa April 2003 Professor President of the Science Council of Japan, and also President of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan Preface This book is a collection of advanced articles covering in a comprehensive fashion various aspects of agent-based manufacturing, drawing from the research work car- ried out in the international project called Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS) from 1993 onward. This HMS project is one of several initiatives undertaken in an in- ternational programme called IMS (Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS), as ex- plained in the Foreword by Professor Yoshikawa. While the book is intended to report the major findings of the HMS project on agent-based manufacturing, it is not an official HMS/IMS publication. Its contents re- flect the choice the editor and the contributors have made. It should also be stated that the HMS project included also other excellent work on various aspects of manufactur- ing, which in the opinion of the editor fell outside the scope of agent-based manufac- turing, and hence does not appear in this volume. The editor is wholly responsible for this choice. Today multi-agent systems (MAS) are an important research area in Computer Science and Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI). The field of agent-based manu- facturing systems offers a major challenge for the MAS researchers, as it has to deal with both logical and physical objects. For example, in the event of a malfunction, a logical object can be logically discarded from the operational environment and the software itself restarted. But this is not feasible with physical objects – they may have to be inspected by human beings for damage and physically removed from the opera- tional environment. In addition the offending machine may have to be replaced and the objects rerouted to another physical location. A malfunction in one part of a pro- duction line can cause partially completed objects to tumble over each other, thus cre- ating a major operational catastrophe. Therefore the issues are far more complex in systems that are involved in the processing of physical objects. The MAS/DAI researchers often like to employ human mental categories in the form of Belief, Desire and Intention (BDI) as the principal problem-solving concepts, usually within a deliberative approach involving symbolic logic processing. Some MAS researchers, such as Rodney Brooks, prefer the alternative reactive approach, while some other multi-agent researchers have constructed hybrid approaches, mixing the deliberative with the reactive. Much of manufacturing seems to be better suited to the reactive treatment – at any rate, the papers presented in this volume follow largely the reactive path. It should be of interest to the multi-agent researchers to see how the top researchers in agent-based manufacturing are examining and providing solutions to real-world problems. They would find much in this book to grapple with. VIII Preface The 21st Century manufacturing is meant to be offering choices to the customers, which in turn requires (i) low-volume high-variety manufacturing to handle those choices, (ii) dynamic shopfloor reconfiguration to meet new requirement flexibility and (iii) an agile environment to respond to changes and new demands quickly. These facilities, it is generally believed, can be best offered by agent-based manufacturing – the central justification for undertaking the HMS project. Observe that HMS was (is) an industry-led project to produce ideas that can lead to product developments. There- fore this book should appeal to the researchers, advanced thinkers and innovators in industry, academia and research centres in manufacturing – in addition to those inter- ested in the multi-agent approach as a research topic. Acknowledgements First I would like to thank my colleagues in the HMS projects who have been able to contribute to this book, despite their busy commitments elsewhere during that period. I am also indebted to the members of my research group, particularly to James Cole, Rashid Jayousi, Thomas Neligwa, Kapila Ponnamperuma and Ryad Soobhany for helping me with much of the administrative and editorial tasks. In particular, Rashid Jayousi spent an enormous amount of time in editing the chapters to ensure a uniform standard. Finally and very importantly, I am especially thankful to Prof Yoshikawa for the Foreword endorsing this book. University of Keele, England S. M. Deen April 2003 Editor Table of Contents Part I: Starters 1 Introduction ................................................................................................. 3 Prof S. M. Deen, Keele University, UK 2 From Fractals and Bionics to Holonics ..................................................... 11 Dr A. Tharumarajah, CSIRO, Australia 3 From FMS to HMS .................................................................................... 31 Dr R.W. Brennan and Prof D.H. Norrie, University of Calgary, Canada Part II: Systems Architecture 4 HMS/FB Architecture and Its Implementation ....................................... 53 Dr J. H. Christensen, Rockwell Automation, USA 5 FIPA Standards and Holonic Manufacturing .......................................... 89 Czech Technical University and Rockwell Automation, Prague, Czech Republic 6 Towards a Formalised HMS Model ........................................................ 121 Dr C. A. Johnson, Keele University, UK Part III: Systems Operation 7 An Investigation into a Computational Model for HMS ....................... 147 Prof S. M. Deen, Keele University, UK 8 An HMS Operational Model ................................................................... 163 T. Neligwa and Dr M. Fletcher, Keele University, UK 9 Holonic Diagnostics for an Automotive Assembly Line ......................... 193 Dr D.H. Jarvis and J.H. Jarvis Agent Oriented Software Pty. Ltd, Australia X Table of Contents Part IV: Application Environments and Issues 10 HMS Development and Implementation Environments ........................ 209 Dr S. Tamura, Dr T. Seki and T. Hasegawa Toshiba, Japan 11 Transport Agents – Specification and Development .............................. 241 A. Ritter, A. Braatz, M. Höpf, C. Schäffer and Prof E. Westkämper Fraunhofer IPA, Germany 12 A Holonic Shot-Blasting System ............................................................. 255 Dr T. Heikkilä, L. Rannanjärvi, M. Sallinen and M, Rintala University of Oulu, VTT Electronics and Blastman Robotics, Finland 13 Holonic Manufacturing Control: Rationales, Developments and Open Issues ........................................... 303 Dr D. C. McFarlane and S. Bussmann University of Cambridge, UK and DaimlerChrysler, Germany
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