Multi-agent systems in production planning and control: an overview

Abstract

The ever fast changes of customers’ needs and demands ask for reconfigurable and adaptive production systems, which can provide companies with the proper level of agility and effectiveness, without disregarding at the same time cost factors. In the last decade, a large amount of research works on the adoption of multi-agent systems (MAS) in several industrial environments has flourished. This approach, unlike traditional centralized or multilevel hierarchical approaches, assumes the presence of several decision-making entities, distributed inside the manufacturing system, interacting and cooperating each other in order to achieve optimal global performance. Aim of this paper is at first to provide readers, which are not experienced with the multi-agent approach, with some definitions and categorizations of this paradigm. Secondarily, by making use of an extensive database of more than 100 contributions on this field, authors intend to evaluate how multi-agents systems have really impacted on the industrial practices at an enterprise and at a broader supply chain level. Finally, driven by the past research experiences of the authors and by the extensive literature search, considerations and remarks on the real potential benefits and on the major issues currently inhibiting the spread out of this paradigm are reported.

Keywords:

• multi-agent systems
• survey
• production planning and control

Acknowledgments

Maria Caridi is a researcher in Industrial Production Management at Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering of Politecnico di Milano, Italy. She received her PhD in Industrial Plants and Production Systems from the University of Parma. Her research interests are in different areas of Production Planning and Control: in particular, she has been studying different issues concerning materials' management (e.g. security stocks under uncertainty, managing engineering changes) and the application of Multi-Agent System theory to manufacturing systems' control. Lastly, as regards the Information Systems, she is concerned in how modern Advanced Planning and Scheduling systems cover manufacturing system requirements and how they can be effectively integrated with Enterprise Resource Planning systems.

Sergio Cavalieri is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Bergamo. Graduated in 1994 in Management and Production Engineering, in 1998 he got the PhD title in Management Engineering at the University of Padua. His main fields of interest are Modelling and Simulation of Manufacturing Systems, Application of Multi-Agent Systems and Soft-computing Techniques (Genetic Algorithms, ANNs, Expert Systems) for Operations and Supply Chain Management. He has been participating to various research projects at national and international level. He has published two books and about forty papers on national and international journals and conference proceedings. He is currently coordinator of the IMS Network of Excellence Special Interest Group on Benchmarking of Production Scheduling Systems and member of the IFAC-TC on Advanced Manufacturing Technology.