An agent based approach to simulate production, degradation, repair, replacement and preventive maintenance of manufacturing systems

The capacity to be able to reconfigure the production systems is considered fundamental for the today manufacturing factories, due to the increasing request of a high performance of customer service level (lead time and price). For this reason, the simulation of the productivity of a specific configuration of a production line becomes a great assistance to the decision making process. This paper presents the potential of a multi-agent model used to simulate the failure behavior of a complex line production. This approach offers a decentralized alternative to design decision-making system based on the simulation of distributed entities. In particular, the presented model is able to independently manage the variations of the production rates and the failure prone, caused by the degradation of the machines, repair actions, and replacements. In addition, random failures, and preventive maintenance of a manufacturing system of a single product were considered. The blackboard system and the contract net protocol have inspired the manner to coordinate the productivity of the different machines in the production line, in order to simulate the highest feasible and most balanced productivity in different states of the line.