Jiri Vokrinek

ExPlanTech: multiagent support for manufacturing decision making

ExPlanTechs multiagent approach offers a unified framework for decision-making support and provides a proven alternative to known mathematical and system science-modeling technologies for simulating the manufacturing process. ExPlanTech provides technological support for various manufacturing problems and comprises different components, which you can assemble to develop a customized system that supports a users decision making in different aspects of production planning. The system should help human users size resources and time requirements for a particular order, creating production plans, optimizing material resources manipulation, managing and optimizing supply chain relationships, visualizing and analyzing medium- and long-term manufacturing processes, and accessing external data.

ExPlanTech: Exploitation of Agent-Based Technology in Production Planning

The mission of the ExPlanTech technology transfer project is to introduce, customize and exploit the multi-agent production planning technology in two distinct industrial cases. The traditional production planning activity is substituted by agent driven service negotiations, intelligent decomposition and distributed decision-making. This paper describes a FIPA-compliant implementation of the ExPlanTech technology at the LIAZ Pattern Shop manufacturing company. We describe the structure of the agent community, types of agents, implementation of the planning strategy and its incorporation within the real production environment.

Developing Multiagent Algorithms for Tactical Missions Using Simulation

The development process and simulation architecture presented here help narrow the gap between how theoretical AI algorithms are traditionally designed and validated and how practical algorithms for controlling robotic assets in simulated tactical missions are developed.

Parallel solver for vehicle routing and pickup and delivery problems with time windows based on agent negotiation

In this paper we present a parallel solver for the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) and the pickup and delivery problem with time windows (PDPTW). The solver is based on parallel competition of particular solvers solving the given problem instance. The particular solvers are based on negotiation between a fleet of agents representing individual vehicles using a cost structure corresponding to the wellknown travel time savings insertion heuristic. The performance of the solver is assessed on the Homberger-Gehring and Li-Lim benchmark sets for the VRPTW and PDPTW case respectively. While both sets are widely used across the routing community, they were not addressed by previous agent-based studies. Thus the achieved average solution quality of 95% and 87% for the VRPTW and PDPTW cases represents a new best known result for these benchmark sets for agent-based approaches. An analysis of the solvers convergence, runtime and parameter sensitivity is provided within the experimental evaluation section, that has also not been provided by previous agent-based studies.

Abstract Architecture for Task-oriented Multi-agent Problem Solving

Problem solving and planning in decentralized environments is a key technical challenge in numerous industrial applications, ranging from manufacturing, logistics, virtual enterprizes to multirobotics systems. We present an abstract architecture of a multiagent solver and respective algorithm providing decomposition, task allocation, and task delegation. Various features of the abstract architecture, such as computational complexity or admissibility of the underlying optimization heuristics, are analyzed in the paper. Four instances of the abstract architecture implementations are given to demonstrate the applicability of the abstract solver in a wide variety of real-problem domains.

Planning and re-planning in multi-actors scenarios by means of social commitments

We present an approach to plan representation in multi-actors scenarios that is suitable for flexible replanning and plan revision purposes. The key idea of the presented approach is in integration of (i) the results of an arbitrary HTN (hierarchical task network) -oriented planner with (ii) the concept of commitments, as a theoretically studied formalism representing mutual relations among intentions of collaborating agents. The paper presents formal model of recursive form of commitments and discusses how it can be deployed to a selected hierarchical planning scenario.

A cooperative driver model for traffic simulations

In this paper, a cooperative driver model for a multi-agent traffic simulation is proposed. The model combines maneuver-based trajectory planning of the vehicles with a cooperative conflict resolving. The proposed model is able to provide a safe drive in complex traffic situations at the highest possible speed. The idea of the model and its feasibility have been verified in complex scenarios such as line change under heavy traffic, highway entering or highway crossing. Moreover, the developed cooperative driver model is being integrated with a human operated driving simulator that enables verification of the proposed model in mixed scenarios enriching the simulation for a human driver with highly cooperative background traffic; thus, providing a platform for further studies on benefits of assistive technologies. The paper provides description of the proposed model and its early evaluation on the selected scenarios in a multi-agent traffic simulation.

ExPlanTech: Multi-agent Framework for Production Planning, Simulation and Supply Chain Management

We present a unified multi-agent technology for decision making support in production planning and scheduling, manufacturing simulation in and supply chain management. The technology has been tested on several industrial cases and is used in a daily production planning processes of one important automobile industry supplier in the Czech Republic.

RBVO Formation Protocol

The proposed protocol has been designed to support a flexible formation of request-based virtual organizations with an emphasis on reflecting the conditions of real competitive environments. It supports automated or semi-automated negotiations mainly in the creation part of a virtual organization life cycle and accounts for a use of service level agreements. The protocol consists of three phases: (i) potential partner search, (ii) negotiation of SLAs and RBVO establishment, and (Hi) RBVO execution and dissolution. The protocol is based on FIPA standards.

From Intra-Enterprise Towards Extra-Enterprise Production Planning

In the domain of production planning multi-agent systems there is a strong demand for extending the solution beyond the borders of a single enterprise in order to meet future business requirements: (i) to manage the extra-enterprise production planning effectively, (ii) to create and reconfigure flexible dynamic configuration of virtual enterprises (e.g. among collaborating business partners). The concept of extra-enterprise agents helps to facilitare secure remote access and manage the production planning processes from outside the factory, inspect the current and the future load of particular production units, modify already running customer projects, or include/invoke a new customer-project into the system remotely.