Yuichi Sakuraba

A machinery control system using mobile agents

Flexibility will be one of the key features in future manufacturing systems because the environments that surround manufacturing systems are rapidly changing from day to day. To satisfy this requirement, we propose an autonomous decentralized system using agents. In manufacturing systems using agents, the basic concept should be based on a target product and on work having some information moving around in the system. To realize this concept, we introduce several agents called product agent or machine agent. To verify our proposed concept and architecture, we developed a prototype system. This system was for the Shape Deposition Manufacturing Laboratory of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.