Pheromone-based coordination for manufacturing system control

  • Authors:

  • Lei Wang;Dun-Bing Tang;Wen-Bin Gu;Kun Zheng;Wei-Dong Yuan;Ding-Shan Tang

  • Affiliations:

  • College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China 210016;College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China 210016;College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China 210016;College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China 210016;College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China 210016;College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China 210016

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

A pheromone-based coordination approach, which comes from the collective behavior of ant colonies for food foraging, is applied to control manufacturing system in this paper, aiming at handling dynamic changes and disturbances. The pheromone quantum of manufacturing cell is calculated inversely proportional to the cost, which can guarantee a minimal cost to process the orders. This approach has the capacity for optimization model to automatically find efficient routing paths for processing orders and to reduce communication overhead which exists in contract net protocol in shop floor control system. A prototype system is developed, and experiments confirm that pheromone-based coordination approach has excellent control performance and adaptability to disturbances in shop floor.