An autonomous manufacturing system for adapting to disturbances

Disruptions in manufacturing systems caused by system changes and disturbances reduce the productivity, and increase the downtime as well as the cost of products. To cope with these challenges, new strategies and technologies have been applied to build an adaptive manufacturing system, namely autonomous manufacturing system (AMS). In the AMS, workpieces, machines, robots, and transporters are the autonomous entities. They have an ability to identify their status and capability autonomously, to collect data, and to take decisions according to the changes of the manufacturing system. In order to implement the AMS, the agent and cognitive technologies were chosen. The AMS needs autonomy and cooperation for solving problems of agents from agent technology. The AMS also needs cognitive capabilities for agents based on cognitive technology. As a result, smarter agents with the cognitive abilities were applied. This paper presents a synthetic method of the two proposed technologies for building autonomous control entities, namely cognitive agents, which control the manufacturing system for adapting to disturbances. The cognitive agents with characteristics of intelligence, autonomy, and communication were proposed to develop the AMS.