An Axiomatic Design of a Multiagent Reconfigurable Mechatronic System Architecture

Abstract

In recent years, the fields of reconfigurable manufacturing systems, holonic manufacturing systems, and multiagent systems have made technological advances to support the ready reconfiguration of automated manufacturing systems. While these technological advances have demonstrated robust operation and been qualitatively successful in achieving reconfigurability, their ultimate industrial adoption remains limited. Among the barriers to adoption has been the relative absence of formal and quantitative multiagent system design methodologies based on reconfigurability measurement. Hence, it is not clear that the degree to which these designs have achieved their intended level of reconfigurability, which systems are indeed quantitatively more reconfigurable, and how these designs may overcome their design limitations to achieve greater reconfigurability in subsequent design iterations. To our knowledge, this paper is the first multiagent system reference architecture for reconfigurable manufacturing systems driven by a quantitative and formal design approach. It is rooted in an established engineering design methodology called axiomatic design for large flexible engineering systems and draws upon design principles distilled from prior works on reconfigurability measurement. The resulting architecture is written in terms of the mathematical description used in reconfigurability measurement, which straightforwardly allows instantiation for system-specific application.