Stigmergy based autonomous shop floor control with wireless sensor networks

The paper deals with the production process control in dynamic shop floor with unforeseen inside and outside disturbances occurring frequently. The emerging wireless sensor network technology is proposed to implement autonomous shop floor control that can improve shop floor performance by distributed and flexible coping of complexity and dynamics. A wireless sensor network based control structure is presented, in which the parts and machines embedded with sensor nodes have the abilities of communicating, computing and decision-making. Based on the proposed structure, a stigmergy based control algorithm is developed to provide efficient and adaptive manufacturing process control. This algorithm imitates ants foraging behavior to enable the active parts autonomously decide efficient processing operations and routing paths in dynamic shop floor based on pheromone. To demonstrate the feasibility and advantage of the proposed control structure and algorithm, a prototype implementation is developed, and experiments are being made with this prototype implementation. The experiment results illustrate the advantages of the proposed approach and its capacity to surmount perturbations.