| This research is concerned with the design, development, and implementation of a unique hybrid multi-agent architecture, called Reagere. The Reagere system is designed to integrated and control a prototypical manufacturing job-shop domain. The underlying architecture is based on top-down concepts from distributed problem solving and bottom-up concepts from multi-agent research. While agent-oriented systems are not new to manufacturing, Reagere is the first to deal with the philosophy of representing parts, equipment, and software packages as individual autonomous agents in the same architecture. Like the conventional Computer Integrated Manufacturing systems, Reagere also deals with the idea of scheduling and control of a job-shop domain. However, unlike these conventional systems Reagere does not suffer from lack of flexibility, upgradability, overhead difficulties, and performance problems when presented with the dynamics of the manufacturing environment.; The overall flexibility of the system is improved by the independent development of each agent and the object-oriented communication events. These communicate events permit the agents to interact as they solve their local problems. The agent are coordinated with the use of control plans, which are activated by control-based agents. These plans are used to modify the behavior of the system. Each plan holds a heuristic or set of heuristics that dictate values for the triggered agents. These triggered agents are then ranked to determine which agent will execute during the next time cycle.; The Reagere system was tested as a simulated predefined automated job-shop domain for the purpose of controlling and coordinating the internal processes of this domain. The system uses process plans that accompany each item (pallets and crates) to determine what action(s) will stimulate and guide the manufacturing domain objectives. While Reagere was tested for only this domain, the overall architecture can be generalized to other prototypical samples from the class of job-shop domain problems. Certain aspects of the Reagere system were also tested in this thesis to further emphasis certain concepts and contributions. |
