Evaluation of a multi-agent approach for a real transportation system

Transportation systems represent the backbone of manufacturing systems and significantly influence their efficiency. Component failures or disturbances generally lead to traffic jams decreasing thereby the throughput and system performance if not even completely interrupt the production process. To cope with such situations, recently a multi-agent system for the transportation domain with capabilities for reconfiguration and adaptive routing has been introduced. The main contribution of this paper is to present the implementation of this multi-agent system on a real pallet transport system. The results of the experiments show the feasibility of the approach on a real manufacturing system and its capability for enhancing the system's fault tolerance preventing thereby a significant loss of production performance.