Decentralized Holonic Control System Model for Line-less Mobile Assembly Systems

Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, vol. 75, pp. 102301

Abstract

The Line-less Mobile Assembly System paradigm (short LMAS) provides necessitated flexibility, especially for large-scale products as customer demands for individualized products persist and product life-cycles remain short. To make LMAS advantages operationally usable in an industrial context, it requires a suitable control system to connect multi-purpose assembly resources and to autonomously configure transient assembly stations. Therefore this paper reviews the relevant literature to identify the necessary components of such architectures. Depending on the control system’s intention and use cases, the properties of the organizational paradigm, an adequate ontology and basic design patterns regarding the distribution and order-relationships of the system entities are to be defined conceptually. For the implementation, a role model, an interaction model, and a data model are required. Due to the utilization of mobile multipurpose resources and the possibility of factory shopfloor reconfiguration by transient stations, existing approaches do not meet LMAS inherent properties. Consequently, we present a suitable decentralized multi-agent control system approach.

Authors 3

1. Armin F. Buckhorst corresponding Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   WZL | RWTH Aachen University, Campus-Boulevard 30, 52074 Aachen, Germany

2. Lea Grahn Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   WZL | RWTH Aachen University, Campus-Boulevard 30, 52074 Aachen, Germany

3. Robert Heinrich Schmitt Aachen Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT

   RWTH Aachen University · Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT

   Affiliation as printed

   Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT, Germany

   WZL | RWTH Aachen University, Campus-Boulevard 30, 52074 Aachen, Germany