An Extended Agent Communication Framework for Rapid Reconfiguration of Distributed Manufacturing Systems

For proactive responses to customer requirements and rapidly advancing technologies, current manufacturing systems are required to be increasingly adaptable and reconfigurable. We present a communication framework between the coordinator, workstation agents, and executors to facilitate the reconfiguration process of manufacturing systems. The message structure of interagent information exchange is extended for the initiation, self-layout recognition, and control program update phases of reconfiguration. To provide more autonomy to a manufacturing system and to synchronize the updated shop floor condition, a self-layout recognition mechanism was developed based on infrared communication that enables each workstation to identify directly linked workstations and share the identified information with other shop floor entities for automatic layout change detection. Furthermore, we propose a message-based reprogramming approach to quickly update, insert, or delete command lines in the existing control program for a specific device in a workstation. We demonstrate a reconfiguration process via the communication framework in a factory testbed consisting of nine main workstations in a laboratory environment.