Research And Realization Of Coordination Mechanism Oriented To Bio-inspired Manufacturing System

The significantly increasing market competition characterized by globalization, dynamic development and customer-driven has put forward higher requirement for the modern manufacturing system. Nowadays the modern manufacturing system is becoming more and more unexpected, such as urgent task and equipment failure. Due to these uncertain factors, all kinds of elements in the modern manufacturing system have to work together better, and make quick response to the disturbance either coming from the inside or outside of the system. In order to make the manufacturing system more self-organized and more self-adaptive, the coordination mechanism of Bio-inspired Manufacturing System (BiMS) is studied in this paper.Firstly, this paper analyses the similarities between manufacturing system and biological system, investigates the basic theory of BiMS by referring to biocybernetics, and proposes the general model of BiMS.Secondly, the conception of coordination is elaborated while the author's own understanding about coordination is also presented. The importance of coordination is pointed out by analyzing the requirements of complicated manufacturing system. Then the coordination is classified into two categories——explicit coordination and implicit coordination, due to their communication mode.After that, the characters of the two different coordination mechanisms are investigated, and their advantages and disadvantages are compared.Thirdly, inspired by ant stigmergy, a pheromone-based implicit coordination mechanism is proposed. It is used to deal with task assignment and react to disturbance. And the simulation result indicates that this coordination mechanism not only reaches the purpose of global-optimization, but also avoids falling into conflict and deadlock which exist in explicit coordination when problem is extremely complicated.Fourthly, a software simulation platform of pheromone-based implicit coordination mechanism is developed by using Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0. This platform realizes such functions as management of machines and production tasks, pheromone-based implicit coordination aiming at dealing with new tasks and machine failure, interaction with ExtendSim, etc.Finally, an experiment is carried out on the hardware simulation platform to verify the effect of the pheromone-based implicit coordination mechanism.