An agent based architecture for material handling systems

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores

In the recent past, market requirements and consequently the production lines changed too. With the customization of products and the growing number of products to produce, the dy-namism and flexibility of the lines are now requirements of extreme importance. A traditional approach indicates great difficulty in satisfying those needs and as such has appeared some proposals in order to solve them. The proposed approaches are mostly related to scheduling and production planning. The transportation system is not usually inserted in the control architecture and system reconfiguration, constantly being put aside in order to this issue. This work proposes architecture to support self-organized transportation system, where it performs control functions and management. The architecture was developed for a system com-prising conveyors where the stations operate. The proposed work is a multi-agent architecture that use Dijkstra’s algorithm to improve the routing of products and materials. The main features of architecture are load balancing pre-sent in conveyors and ability to plug and unplug stations in runtime. The architecture was first tested in a virtual environment in order to check the behavior of the same and was subsequently tested in a real industrial cell in order to demonstrate its use in a real system.