Distributed control of job-shop systems via edge reversal dynamics for automated guided vehicles

Omar Lengerke (1) , Hernan González Acuña (1) , Max Suell Dutra (2) , Felipe França (2) , Felix Mora-Camino (3)

1 Mechatronic and Robotic Laboratory
2 COPPE-UFRJ - Instituto Alberto Luiz Coimbra de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa de Engenharia
3 LAAS-DISCO - Équipe DIagnostic, Supervision et COnduite

Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS), in which the use of Automatically Guided Vehicles (AGVs) is typical, are a growing trend in many industrial scenarios. A novel, distributed, algorithmic approach to the execution control of activities (work-center oriented) is introduced in this paper, as is, in an integrated way, transportation (AGV oriented) scheduling. The relationship between jobs, modeled as processes, and work centers, modeled as resources, and sinks defines an undirected graph G representing a target Job-shop system. Analogously, the transportation performed by AGVs, also modeled as processes, and their corresponding physical paths, modeled as resources, can also be seen as a dual Job-shop problem. The new approach is based on the Scheduling by Edge Reversal (SER) graph dynamics which, from an initial acyclic orientation over edges, that can be defined via traditional and/or efficient heuristics, let jobs and AGVs proceed in a deadlock-and-starvation-free fashion without the need for any central coordination.

Mots clés: job-shop; distributed algorithm; graph dynamics; Flexible Manufacturing System; Scheduling by Edge Reversal; Automatically Guided Vehicles

Domaines: Automatique / Robotique

Omar Lengerke, Hernan González Acuña, Max Suell Dutra, Felipe França, Felix Mora-Camino. Distributed control of job-shop systems via edge reversal dynamics for automated guided vehicles. INTELLI 2012, 1st International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Applications, Apr 2012, Chamonix / Mont Blanc, France. pp 25-30. ⟨hal-00938526⟩