Switching mode control strategy in manufacturing execution systems
Résumé
The paper describes a semi-heterarchical control solution for mixed planning and scheduling, routing and job execution in flexible manufacturing systems based on the paradigms of holonic manufacturing and product-driven automation. The main feature of the control solution is the bidirectional switching of the operating mode (scheduling, routing) between centralised and decentralised in the presence of perturbations to ensure as long as possible both global optimisation and agility to changes in batch orders, while featuring robustness to disturbances in the production environment. At the theoretical level, the control solution is described in terms of generic structural and dynamic models. The implementation is done using a multi-agent Java Agent Development Framework framework.