Distributed Negotiation-Based Task Planning for a Flexible Manufacturing Environment

In a exible manufacturing environment a group of autonomous agents such as autonomous mobile robots and intelligent manufacturing units is supposed to cooperate and avoid bad interaction. Thus they must have the capability to build a common multi-agent plan through detailed adequate agreements and take into consideration the group goals as well as those of the individual agents. We present an approach of a distributed planning method to solve dynamically some typical tasks of a production planning system at control level without using a xed central component. To archieve this, a exible manufacturing system has been modelled as a multi-agent system, while the planning method we present uses the structure of manufacturing plans to coordinate properly their activities through negotiation among the agents. The distributed planning method which was developed has been implemented and tested on a pool of workstations.