A wasp-based control model for real-time routing of parts in a flexible manufacturing system

This article presents a self-adaptive, wasp-based control model for real-time part routing in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). Inspired from the natural system of a wasp colony, the proposed control model is a multi-agent system that exhibits adaptive behaviour. It uses simple rules built on a decentralized architecture and hence it overcomes the drawbacks of traditional agent-based systems, such as long negotiation times among agents. The production problem, which has been previously studied in the literature, includes real-time routing of parts with the objective of minimizing average waiting times and average cycle times in a large FMS that consists of 40 machines. The proposed wasp-based control model is benchmarked via simulation under various experimental conditions against those previously published studies.