Modeling and analysis of a simple manufacturing-oriented multi-agent system

Due to the autonomy of individual agents and the use of the concept of dist ributed planning, multi-agent systems (MAS) represent a promising approach to achieve fault-tolerant self-organizing manufacturing systems, In this ar ticle, a basic component of a manufacturing-oriented MAS is presented, The negotiation strategies are formulated in such a way that they, on the one h and, guarantee considerable flexibility of the basic component itself, and, on the other hand, enable the construction of more complex systems built u p from several components, On the basis of this single component, it is sho wn that the dynamics of such systems without appropriate control mechanisms can be chaotic. Such behaviour is, however, unwanted in practice and must therefore be stabilized or avoided, In order to develop appropriate tools f or this task, the dynamic behaviour of the system is investigated using con cepts and methods of synergetics and the theory of nonlinear dynamical syst ems.