Distributed Real-Time Production Control for Resilient Manufacturing Systems

To enable resilient manufacturing, production control systems must be able to adapt quickly and flexibly to unexpected changes. Motivated by Industrie 4.0, multi-agent systems offer a promising approach to meet these requirements. This paper presents a method for distributed production control that enables production entities to make optimal decisions regarding capacity utilization and the compliance of delivery dates in real-time despite disruptive events. Based on a multi-agent Markov Decision Process, production entities are modeled as autonomous software agents that can solve Flexible Job-Shop Problems through message passing. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in a simulated production environment.