A Flexible Reasoning Mechanism for the Trade-off of System Versus Local goals in Sensible Agents

Planning and control systems for highly dynamic and uncertain manufacturing environments require adaptive flexibility and decision-making capabilities. Modern distributed manufacturing systems assess the utility of planning and executing solutions for both system goals (e.g. minimize manufacturing production time for all parts or minimize WIP), and local goals (expedite part A production schedule or maximize machine X utilization). In this paper, an approach based on Sensible Agents, which dynamically alter their autonomy levels to use a variety of decision models (e.g. Expected Utility, Prospect, or Social Judgement), is presented. Sensible Agents provide for trade-off reasoning among system and local utilities that is flexible and responsive to an agent’s abilities, situational context, and position in the organizational structure of the system. Content Areas: multi-agent system, distributed manufacturing systems, distributed scheduling Word Count: 1646 Acknowledgment: This research was supported in part by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (#003658415). Accepted by: CAICIM, Rensselaer’s International Conference on Agile, Intelligent, and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing October 7-9, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York A Flexible Reasoning Mechanism for the Trade-off of System Versus Local goals in Sensible Agents K. S. Barber T. H. Liu A. Goel S. Ramaswamy The Laboratory for Intelligent Processes and Systems Electrical and Computer Engineering The University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78712 [email protected]