Manufacturing intelligent agent simulation has not been
widely applied in industry because of its application
complexity. This complexity, which includes choosing
priority machines or jobs, determining machine maintenance
schedules, and allocating working shifts and breaks,
requires intelligent decision making. Manufacturing systems
are strongly influenced by intelligent decision makers.
Especially for a fixed manufacturing layout, system
performance improvement depends on intelligent manufacturing
decision making. As a result, a manufacturing simulation can
not be truly complete if intelligent decision making
processes are not represented. This thesis describes an
architecture which includes the representation of
intelligent agents in manufacturing simulation model.
An intelligent agent simulation environment (IASE) is
developed under the concepts of distributed artificial
intelligence and object oriented methodology. As an
extension to an existing simulation environment, IASE
inherits primary manufacturing simulation elements and
material handling systems from object oriented manufacturing
architecture (Beaumariage, 1990) and AGV simulation system
(Beaumariage and Wang, 1995). In IASE, production operators,
maintenance technicians and job releasers are created to
represent manufacturing intelligent agents. Several basic
elements such as the blackboard structure and knowledge base
for supporting intelligent agent simulation are also
developed. In contrast to traditional simulation
environments designed for and in procedural programming
languages, future extensions or modifications for IASE are
eased since IASE is developed in an object oriented fashion.
This paper introduces IASE structure both in the
conceptual design and implementation methodology levels. At
the end, two case studies are performed. The first case
study is to verify IASE's implementation and results by
comparing it with a model developed in SLAM II. The second
case study, a mixed intelligent agent decision making
example, demonstrates the intelligent agent simulation
ability of IASE. / Graduation date: 1997
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/34087 |
| Date | 27 June 1996 |
| Creators | Liang, Chien-Tsun |
| Contributors | Beumariage, Terrence G. |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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