Sub-Committees : I(M)
Sub-Committee - Infrastructure (Manufacturing)
- Co-Chair:
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Jon Agirre Ibarbia (Fundación Fatronik) 
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- Co-Chair:
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Robert Harrison (Loughborough University) 
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- Mission and Focus:
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The mission of this subcommittee aims at the improvements in the profile, industrial relevance, quality, and take-up of agent research as key enabling technology especially for their application in industrial manufacturing.
The focus. Manufacturing systems are inherently distributed and heterogeneous. Products are designed and manufactured by a range of people with different skills using a variety of systems specialized for different functions. Not long ago, the product development process (spanning the product life-cycle from design to distribution) was characterized by islands of automation as automation was applied to the various computation-intensive tasks in a product's development. More recently, significant effort has gone into bridging the islands of automation and streamlining the development process. In many industries this streamlining has become highly tuned so as to minimize the actual time from raw material to point-of-sale.
The goal. This subcommittee aims at promoting the research on agent-based systems on industrial problems, by facilitating the transfer of user requirements from industry to agent researchers, and the transfer of research results to industry. At increasing the interest of the industry on agent-based applications, and demonstrating the potential of this technology for solving real industrial problems.
Research on multi-agent systems is concerned with how agents may coordinate and share their knowledge goals, skills and plans to take actions to solve problems (Jennings et al. 98). Consequently, MAS may allow the development of incremental systems that require the addition of few agents in order to be able to cope with new problems. Many applications of multi-agent systems in manufacturing have been reported, including planning (Saad et al. 96), scheduling (Murthy et al. 97) or (Maturana et al. 99), intelligent control of machine tools (Brückner et al. 98). An extensive review can be found in (Shen et al. 99). Among the most prominent results are the developments by DaimlerChrysler (Bussmann, 2001 & 2004), where a multi-agent manufacturing control system has been deployed in a factory; this research was situated in the wider framework of Holonic Manufacturing Systems.
- References:
- Brückner et al. 98:
Brückner, S, Wyns, J, Peeters, P, Kollingbaum, M. (1998). Designing Agents for the Manufacturing Process Control. In Proceedings of Artificial Intelligence and Manufacturing Research Planning Workshop - State of the Art & State of the Practice, AAAI Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico, pp. 40-46. - Bussmann, 2001 & 2004:
S. Bussmann and K. Schild. An Agent-based Approach to the Control of Flexible Production Systems. Proc. 8th IEEE Intern. Conf. on Emergent Technologies and Factory Automation, 2001. Bussmann, N. Jennings and M. Wooldridge. Multi-agent Systems for Manufacturing Control, A Design Methodology. Springer Series on Agent Technology, ISBN: 3-540-20924-7, 2004. - Jennings et al. 98:
Jennings N., Woolridge M. (Eds), Agent Technology: foundations, applications and market, Springer Verlag, 1998. - Maturana et al. 99:
Maturana, F. and Norrie, D. (1996). Multi-Agent Mediator Architecture for Distributed manufacturing. Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, 7, 257-270. - Murthy et al. 97:
Murthy, S., Akkiraju, R., Rachlin, J. and Wu, F. (1997). Agent-Based Cooperative Scheduling. In Proceedings of AAAI Workshop on Constrains and Agents, AAAI Press, pp. 112-117. - Saad et al. 96:
Saad A, Kawamura K, Biswas G., Performance Evaluation of Contract Net-Based Heterarchical Scheduling for Flexible Manufacturing Systems. International Journal of Automation and Soft Computing, Special Issue on Intelligent Manufacturing Planning and Shopfloor Control, 1996. - Shen et al. 99:
Shen, W. and Norrie, D.H. Agent-Based Systems for Intelligent Manufacturing: A State-of-the-Art Survey. Knowledge and Information Systems, an International Journal, 1(2), 129-156, 1999