| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,100,000)
Fiscal Year 1998: ¥900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000)
Fiscal Year 1997: ¥1,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,200,000)
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| Research Abstract |
The aims of this research study were developing the software environment for FA (Factory Automation) integrating manufacturing cells, developing the FA software programming paradigm for distributed and collaborative manufacturing systems which makes those systems intelligent and highly-functioned, and also enhancing productivity and maintenance-ability of highly value-added FA software systems such as production management and equipment control.
For these aims, I have developed an infrastructure system for FA control and named it "Glue Logic". This system manages the information on the provider and the consumer of each information at one place, and construct dependency relations among multiple agents dynamically at run-time. These relations illustrates flow of control, which is implemented by chaining information dependency, and the Glue Logic system provides each agents the notification messages which inform the change of the value of declared interested information. Using this infrastructure, I have proposed a method to program effective and reusable agents and a simple way for the implementation of message transaction among component agents, and also I have been evaluating feasibility of real-time intelligent control systems.
In the first year, I developed prototype of work-cell control computers, also developed the "Glue Logic" software system including server program and some general purpose application agents, and opened my basic idea and program source codes via the Internet. In the next year, I developed some application programs, such as process scheduling problems and other combination optimising problems. These problem solvers are consisting of multiple agents work together, and search the tree-structured state space for answers with acceptable cost-performance ratio using heuristic knowledges. Through this development process, I evaluated requirements gathered by hearing from explicit and implicit users, I decided further research and development items.
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