Emerald Literati Network 2013 Awards for Exellence 2013: Participants of our project published a paper about IDEAS project in Assembly Automation last year. The paper has been chosen as an Outstanding Paper Award Winner at the Literati Network Awards for Exellence 2013. Every year Emerald invites each journal’s Editorial Team to nominate what they believe has been that title’s Outstanding Paper and up to three Highly Commended Papers from the previous year (2012). Our paper has been included among these and the article entitled “The IDEAS project: plug & produce at shop-floor level” published in Assembly Automation has been chosen as an Outstanding Paper Award Winner at the Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2013. The award winning papers are chosen following consultation amongst the journal’s Editorial Team, many of whom are eminent academics or practitioners. Our paper has been selected as it was one of the most impressive pieces of work the team has seen throughout 2012. For more details of the paper please click here.

One of the eleven projects selected by the European Commission so far since FP6 for the special award of Success Stories. IDEAS project is published on the website European Commission, Directorate-General for Research & Innovation on the Success Stories page. Please click on the link for more information.

To develop agents we use the platform JADE that provides basic middleware-layer functionalities which are independent of the specific application and which simplify the realization of distributed applications that exploit the software agent abstraction. A significant merit of JADE is that it implements this abstraction over a well-known object-oriented language, Java, providing a simple and friendly API. The LEAP (Lightweight Extensible Agent Platform) add-on, when combined with JADE, replaces some parts of the JADE kernel forming a modified runtime environment that we will identify as JADE-LEAP and that can be deployed on a wide range of small devices.

Obviously we can agentify everything but, increasing the granularity, for example realizing a complex system with more agentified modules (major number of elementary skills), the system performance could be bad for a high network bandwidth required and for major difficulties to synchronize all the agents (figure 1).

Each agent will have adaptive behaviour, so it can modify its job considering both environment conditions and the information exchanged with others agents. We put our attention on testing and diagnostic procedures. Testing focuses on fault detection. Diagnosis consists of determining the nature of a detected fault, locating and fixing it. We have decided to use “quantitative models based” algorithm based on Kalman filter and neural network. The main advantages of this method are that we can reduce the number of sensors, minimize the disturbance effects, and estimate the same Masmec is developing a demonstrator (figure 2) to show the entire ideas concept from an industrial point of view. The demonstrator has a transportation line that transports pallets with memory tag which contain all the data related to the piece on it. The test case is given by CRF.

The concepts presented on the final demonstrator are:

• No need of written code for process design but only a simple workflow realization using a graphical tool

• Agentification of legacy modules (robot, screwed) and custom modules (SCARA, leak units) realizing a robust mechatronic agent architecture

• Adaptability and self-configuring concepts present during line production

• Use of simple and intuitive graphical interface (i.e. AUTOMATION ML editor) to configure an assembly line with DCS (Distributed Control System)

• Possibility to interface to other CAD/CAM tools using innovative XML standards (Automation ML) that uses COLLADA for 3D graphics and allows to interface with other XML standards

Station 1: The operator loads the electronic unit with the already mounted but not tightened screws. The KUKA robot picks the unit with one gripper and places it under a screwdriver to tighten all screws. After the robot places the control unit on the pallet.

Station 2 and 3: These stations perform leak tests directly on the pallet through a piston and a “Versa” device. Two stations are used to show the “plug and produce” philosophy.

Station 4: This is a manual station. When station number 5 is out of order the pallet arrives in this manual station and the operator unload it. Red and green lights show the test results.

Station 5: The MASMEC SCARA robot takes the finished piece and puts it in a good or scrap conveyor.

An important milestone of IDEAS was the completion of the pre-demonstrator. The aim of the pre-demonstrator was to show, that a system, consisting of mechatronic agents, is working stable in an industrial environment. The pre-demonstrator was designed to present a first version of IDEAS multiagent system (MAS) in order to use it as a test bed for the MAS architecture to support the further development of the architecture. To save time it was decided to use an existing system from FESTO and integrate the multiagent system into that system. The selected system Miniprod (miniaturised production system) is a miniaturised production platform with pluggable process units and a flexible, two-dimensional transportation system (see figure).

As controller platform the Combo200 a standard industrial PLC platform from ELREST was selected which is able to run JADE agents for the IDEAS MAS. Elrest further provided a library, which allows the JADE agents on the Combo200 to control the hardware I/O’s of the controller directly.

The multiagent architecture for the pre-demonstrator was developed by UNINOVA, Masmec, KTH, Elrest, University of Nottingham, KIT and FESTO. The agent state model was developed by Masmec and UNINOVA. Festo prepared the pre-demonstrator for the system integration and implemented the path planning agent and the PLC code for the pre-demonstrator transportation system. UNINOVA and KTH implemented the agents for the resources of the system and the agent user interface – an agent management system to control the multiagent system. This tool includes a graphical editor to prepare process work flow data by drag and drop. The single components of the system were put together in a final integration workshop in January 2011.

With the pre-demonstrator we were able to implement a multiagent system in an existing and enclosed production environment with well-defined interfaces. The system reacted automatically to changing conditions of the production system. Also the flexible usage of resources in the system needed to fulfil the process execution. Another conceptual point was a new way of engineering which is supposed to be one major outcome of the IDEAS concept: The pre-demonstrator was able to run production processes without any programming effort. Processes were prepared with the help of a graphical editor by drag and drop. The multiagent system then organized the execution of the process autonomously the process work flow data as the only input.

The outcome of the first demonstrator of IDEAS shows that usability of a concept like IDEAS in industrial applications is reachable and that soon we will be able to provide stable and innovative solutions for industrial customers.