Composite Capabilities for Cloud Manufacturing

Abstract

We present a tool for extracting and abstracting the composite or "collective" capabilities of a multi-agent system (MAS) given the individual capabilities of the agents in the MAS. We consider a setting where agents represent manufacturing or assembly resources such as CNC machines and robots, and the goal is to determine the composite capabilities of the manufacturing system as a whole, i.e., the products it can make. This differs from previous work that studied whether and how a particular product can be manufactured by a given set of manufacturing resources. Our question is "which products---or more generally, which manufacturing activities---can the agents jointly perform?" This is key to realising the Industry 4.0 vision of flexible, adaptive and networked manufacturing systems, in which decentralised production resources form "smart factories" that communicate and collaborate and where manufacturing capabilities are advertised as manufacturing services in a manufacturing cloud.