Pheromone based emergent shop floor control system for flexible flow shops

New approaches for the development of shop floor control systems are needed to introduce better response to unanticipated disturbance situations and a better handling of 'reconfiguration' in production environments. In this p aper, a development approach for agent-based shop floor control systems is presented, that uses co-ordination concepts as observable in insect colonie s. In this scheme, agents operate within an information distribution enviro nment, where information is made available in the form of 'artificial phero mones'. Pheromone concepts from insect colonies and their mapping into a co ntrol system architecture are presented, a test bed implementation is discu ssed. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.