Multiagent-based modeling for re-entrant manufacturing system

Re-entrant flow manufacturing system is a typical mix of different process types, sequence-dependent setup times, very expensive equipment, and re-entrant flows. A multiagent-based modeling technology for re-entrant manufacturing system was addressed. The model of Agent-based Colored Timed Petri-Net (ACTPN) is constructed, which consists of the material flow net model and the interactive protocol model. In the material flow net, the interior behavior of machine agent was encapsulated and it was separated into the system layer, machine group layer and machine agent layer to form a hierarchical multiagent-based model, which reduced the complexity and improved the reusability of the model. In the view of modeling methodology of the interactive protocol net, the transforming rule from Agent Unified Modeling Language (AUML) to ACTPN was given so as to map the AUML model to ACTPN model. In the view of the analysis method of the interactive protocol net, it was integrated with a reachability graph to check the liveness and bound properties of interactive protocol model. A distributed discrete event simulation platform to evaluate the performance of the multiagent-based re-entrant manufacturing system was built. An illustrative example of a 6-inch semiconductor fabrication line in Shanghai demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach proposed.