An RFID-based distributed control system for mass customization manufacturing

Abstract

Mass customization production means to produce customized products to meet individual customer's need with the efficiency of mass production. It introduces challenges such as drastic increase of varieties, very small batch size and random arrival of orders, thus brings to the manufacturing control system requirements of flexibility and responsiveness which make mass customization production a fertile ground for intelligent agents. With RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) integration, an applicable agent-based heterogeneous coordination mechanism is developed to fulfill the requirements. In this paper, we propose a distributed system framework including a number of intelligent agents to collaborate in a virtual market-like environment. The proposed price mechanism in our system has the advantage of improving the production efficiency and total profit that the manufacturer will receive from a certain amount of jobs by utilizing a mechanism of both resource competition and job competition. Based on the simulation results, we compare the total profit, average delay and average waiting time of our agent-based price mechanism with those based on the widely exploit FIFO (First In First Out) and EDD (Earliest Due Date) scheduling mechanisms to show that when resources are with large queue length, the agent-based price mechanism significantly outperforms the other two. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.