Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Future manufacturing is envisioned to be highly flexible and adaptable. New technologies for reconfigurable systems and their adaptations are preconditions for this vision. Without such solutions, engineering adaptations of Industrial Process Measurement and Control Systems (IPMCS) will exceed the costs of engineered systems by far and the reuse of equipment will become inefficient. Especially the reconfiguration of control applications is not sufficiently solved. This paper gives an overview of the use of reconfiguration applications for downtimeless system evolution of control applications on basis of the standard IEC 61499. A new approach for the reconfiguration of IEC 61499 based control application and the corresponding modeling is discussed. This new method significantly increases engineering efficiency and reuse in component-based IPMCS.

Semi-industrial pilot plants are the best experimental domain for advanced control systems testing with the real-world instrumentation. At the same time, inexpensive flexible process real-time simulators and virtual soft controllers are indispensable in the research and education field. Integrating control instrumentation of varying manufacturers, plant simulators, and virtual controllers into uniform system capable of flexible research and educational experiments is a complex problem to solve. A tool is needed to describe and organise knowledge on such integrated structure involving many communication channels and using distributed processing power. In the presented case-study, holarchy paradigm is applied, resulting in an untypical holonic multiagent system. The concept, architecture and development of application framework for the system are presented thoroughly in the paper.

The paper deals with the methods for detection and avoidance of collisions of autonomously moving vehicles utilizing the principles and techniques of multi-agent systems. Three different scenarios are discussed: (i) movement of AGVs in 2D space with fixed trajectories, (ii) movement of autonomous robots in an open 2D space and (iii) collision-free flights of unmanned aerial vehicles. For each category, an agent-based solution is proposed. Presented experiments show that the cooperative approach to detecting and avoiding collisions based on negotiation and goal sharing of agents, representing vehicles, seems to be highly efficient. The multi-layer architecture combining cooperative approach with algorithms based on dynamic no-access zones for avoiding non-cooperative vehicles provides good results in generating collision-free flight corridors.

The paper discusses the problem of automated processing and classification of unstructured text and proposes a new approach based on the multi-agent technology. The proposed method was successfully used to develop a system for a large UK insurance company capable of analysing and classifying 25000 documents related to car insurance, as well as creating template contract documents. The paper describes the system, presents testing results and discusses perspectives.

The diagnostic system discussed in this paper provides an agent-based approach to advanced on-board diagnostics of operation and communication failures occurring in an electronic automotive system. To facilitate development and testing of agent-based automotive diagnostics, a software simulator of automotive electronics systems, also based on multi-agent technology, has been implemented, allowing the developers to simulate various automotive system failures. The paper presents both the proof-of-concept on-board diagnostics system and the simulation layer used for its development and testing. The following topics are covered: simulation of the hardware units, simulation of user-invoked hardware failures, distributed detection and diagnostics of the failures, and visualization. The proposed automotive diagnostics approach can be deployed on real automotive electronics hardware.

We are glad to present the papers of the special session on Performance in Industrial Holonic Systems (Pi-HolS 2007) at the 3 International Conference on Industrial Applications of Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems (HoloMAS 2007). The session brought together researchers and practitioners in the areas of holonic and multi-agent systems, knowledge engineering, and performance management to share their views and experience in design, development, deployment, and application of technologies for measuring, assessing and optimizing the performance of industrial systems based on holonic principles.

Business performance management today does not possess a rigorous and grounded engineering methodology capable of delivering reliably measured values to backing up decision making. Much more it is the art of executive gurus who listen to their backbone experience and take their decisions using intuitive and heuristic approaches. This vagueness appears to be one of the main reasons for current dissatisfaction in industry. In this paper we express our vision of how a rigorous engineering methodology for business performance management in engineering design may look like. Our research work in PSI and PRODUKTIV+ projects strongly suggests that the underlying modeling framework has to be holonic. We consider that the solution has to: (i) be based on a sound Domain ontology of performance; (ii) use dynamic distributed planning technique and simulations to predict the performance of a design system; (iii) use the methodology which is sensitive to the specificities of a particular design system.

When manufacturers, distributors and dealers need to collaborate, they form production networks because this provides significant advantages in production variety, flexibility and lead time. Production processes in such networks often spawn different specific tasks that are to be solved by the network members. This requires creation of a team able to tackle the identified problem. When dealing with multiple organizations and multiple processes within a complicated production network, trying to find a member that has required competence can be a laborious, time-consuming process. Developing and maintaining competence profiles of all the relevant parties associated with production can significantly reduce the time. The paper proposes an approach to team configuration based on competence profiles. The approach utilizes such technologies as ontology management, context management and profiling. Using ontological representation makes it possible to identify those team members who are best suited for the task by ontology matching.

An approach to extend process monitoring with the help of information agents (IA) handling semantic data is presented in this paper. According to this approach, an operator of a process automation system can configure monitoring tasks that a group of IAs performs proactively. The monitoring tasks are assumed to be composites which refer to several process observations and their logical relations. The purpose of these composite monitoring tasks is to enhance the work of the operator by letting him to supervise process phenomena at a higher level of abstraction instead of following a large amount of simple measurement data. The monitoring agents operate as a multi-agent system consisting of agents with capabilities to combine both numerical and symbolic information from several data sources. The agents can setup and execute user configured monitoring tasks cooperatively. The approach is illustrated with test scenarios using data from an industrial paper making process.

This paper presents the concepts and the techniques of implementation of Virtual Reality (VR) - based simulations into the design of the Holonic Manufacturing Systems. An integrated methodology is presented, which has been developed for modelling and simulations of a manufacturing system with holonic control with the aid of VR. The main focus is given to the implementation in small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) using limited expertise and minimum costs. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented method, an application in a medium-sized die-casting factory is presented.The overall performance of the factory has been tested for implementation of a robot-arm integrated die casting cell with holonic control architecture. In this regard, the best course of action for enterprise’s investment decisions has been investigated with the least disruption to existing production activities.