Agent-based Manufacturing in a Production Grid - Adapting a Production Grid to the Production Paths

In standard mass production, batch processing is widely accepted. The advantage of batch processing is that production equipment can be placed in a so called production line. A product only has to follow this line and all production steps will be performed. However, this set-up is not adequate for low cost small quantity production. In this paper, agile production of small quantities in a grid of reconfigurable production machines called equiplets is described. One of the challenges in this approach is the transport of the product between the equiplets during production. This paper describes some heuristic methods to reduce the average path a product has to follow in the production grid.