Adjustable Autonomy for Manufacturing Cell Control Systems

Agents with Adjustable Autonomy

Volume

Papers from the 1999 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Manufacturing-process control and management often deal with millions of activities. These activities are defined at several levels of abstraction from the machine level concerning specific machining activities to the cell/line level that supports interaction of a group of machines, and more generally to the shop-floor level and then to the supply-chain level. Cell control--which particularly focuses on developing autonomous systems for supporting interactive activities at the cell level--is often most crucial in production. This working note focuses on the study of {it adjustable autonomy} for cell control. Research is being conducted for achieving efficient and high-quality manufacturing processes with a rich set of functional components including machining control, scheduling and planning, sensing and monitoring, diagnosis and recovery, and simulations and experimentation.