Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Agent based manufacturing is an important area from a research and implementation points of view. In the past decade agent based manufacturing has become popular and many applications are built. In this keynote paper we survey the field with special emphasis on The International Institution of Production Research’s activities in this area. The original extended paper is referenced at the end of this paper.

Condition monitoring and diagnosis systems capable of identifying machining system dejects and their location are essential for unmanned machining. Unattended (or minimally manned) machining would resu1t in increased capital equipment utilization, thus substantially reducing the manufacturing costs. A review of tool monitoring systems and techniques and their components and the Multiple Principle Component fuzzy neural network for tool condition monitoring machining are presented.

Due to new economical challenges and recent trends regarding international trade and globalization, many companies from the Canadian forest products industry are now facing the need to reengineer their organizational processes and business practices with their partners. This paper proposes on architecture which aims to enable the development of advanced planning systems for the forest products industry. This architecture combines agent technology with operational research, in order to take advantage of the ability of agent-based technology to integrate distributed decision problems, and the ability of operation research to solve complex decision problems This paper describes how this architecture has been configured into an advanced planning and scheduling tool for the lumber industry, and how it is being validated

We are interested in providing an agent infrastructure for truly distributed control. Requirements include multiple language implementations so that this agent host environment can exist in real-time controllers. Our first infrastructure, the Autonomous Cooperative System (ACS) was built as a low, priority control task within the operating system of the automation controllers. The environment added the, functionality to host a set of agents This ACS kernel evolved for a long time almost independently of the controller operating system. New releases of the controllers will cause complications in the integration of the software and adoption of new functionality. We need to evolve ACS to be seamless integrated with the controllers. These changes will affect the infrastructure. In this document, we discuss the implications and results of the transformation.

Manufacturing scheduling is a comp1ex combinatorial problem, particularly in distributed and dynamic environments. This paper presents a holonic approach to manufacturing scheduling, which in opposite to traditional approaches, distributes the scheduling functions over several entities, combining their calculation power and local optimization. In this scheduling and control approach, the scheduling mechanism evolves dynamically to combine optimized scheduling, achieved by central entities, and distributed scheduling, improving its responsiveness and robustness.

The scheduling process, usually involve the evaluation and selection of one alternative between a set of them. These decisions are not trivial, considering that they usually involve multiple, and sometimes conflicting, criteria. Particularly in scheduling which aim is to find the trade off between loading efficiency and delivery accuracy taking into account holding costs, tardiness penalties and expedition charges. Scheduling decisions should be taken in respect with the result of the integration of different criteria weighted according the several perspectives from manufacturing environment namely, production, commercial, and quality. So, scheduling is a multi-criteria decision problem; in practice different schedulers may agree as to the key objectives but differ greatly as to their relative importance in any given situation. The purpose of this paper is to address collaborative scheduling in complex dynamic manufacturing environment, presenting a collaborative scheduling approach which considers group decision support.

Supply chain management is a popular trend for intensive global competition, and the performance analysis plays an important role in improving supply chain. This paper introduces the basic of the supply chain management and performance analysis. We emphasize the importance of building the performance analysis system to evaluate the entire supply chain. Via reviewing the characteristics of supply chain and challenges in supply chain performance analysis. we design a framework of performance analysis system to meet the challenges in supply chain performance evaluation, and then give an application in this paper.

Material handling is a loose loop in most assembly plants. Just-in-time (JIT) is a management philosophy that strives to eliminate sources of manufacturing waste by producing the right part in the right place at the right time. We propose to apply JIT principles to material handling in assembly plants. Material Kanbans are introduced as an effective means to control and balance the physical material/part flow in the plant floor. An agent-based simulation prototype is implemented using Anylogic™. The flexibility of the agent-based approach, facilitates the simulation of various “what-if” scenarios including different layout designs, objective parameters and dynamic situations in the plant floor.

This paper describes an intelligent approach to represent information including uncertainly specified time periods by software agents in medical environment. Temporal reasoning capabilities are based on uncertainty ontology modeling and generalized Allen’s interval relations. An example of temporal reasoning capabilities in data annotated by means of the temporal ontology is given.

The development of integrated supply chains and the use of inter-organizational information systems have increased business interdependencies. Thus, the ability to deal quickly and seamlessly with everyday unplanned events is critical to maintain the overall performance of the supply chain. In order to develop tools to promote the collaborative management of such events, agent-based technology takes advantage of agents’ ability to make autonomous decisions in a distributed context. Collaborative Event Management (CEM) is an approach designed to improve agility in a context where planning decisions are supported by a distributed advanced planning system (d-APS). This paper proposes an agent model geared with tools to collaboratively plan operations to deal with unplanned events.