Routing proposition to face myopia in flexible manufacturing system distributed control
Résumé
Decentralized decision-making processes in manufacturing control offer seeking fault-tolerance, scalability, flexibility, adaptability and reactivity. However, many convergence problems appear: decisional entities do not have a clear vision whether or not the system is heading towards its objectives. They also encounter difficulties to consider future state of the system. In this paper, we consider the routing problem in FMS distributed control. The routing problem means: how products choose their routes in the FMS to achieve the allocated resource at the right time to execute their task. For that reason, the remaining occupancy time (RT) of resources, as the data representing the future state of the system, is used. This time (RT) is used by the product to choose the best path that will bring it to the resource at the exact moment when it is released by means of waiting loops. Experiments show that this approach reduces average waiting time of products and consequently the entire production time.