| Distributed problem solving techniques have been applied to understanding human speech, vehicular tracking and air traffic control. Manufacturing environments are naturally distributed operations whether within a single shop or a large complex. Much research has been conducted on the individual aspects of the manufacturing environment such as inventory control, scheduling of work cells, scheduling of material handling equipment and quality control. This study is intended to provide an approach to integrate all of these aspects and develop a scheduler that can have a global view of the environment by using distributed problem solving techniques.;By using a three level hierarchy, this proposed system can coordinate among modules to achieve an overall view of the environment and control the actions within the system. This study explores individual modules executing on separate computer workstations simulating what would be encountered on the factory floor with individual workcells. The architecture provides an explicit control, blackboard approach for transmitting messages among the modules. By combining a flexible manufacturing system with a distributed scheduling system, manufacturers can take advantage of the already available computing, communicating and control resources to upgrade their capability for parallel processing without the investment of large amounts of capital for new hardware. |
