An agent-based concept for planning and control of the production of carbon fibre reinforced plastics aircraft structures with mobile production units

This article is concerned with the control of the production of aircraft primary structures made of carbon fibre reinforced plastics. To increase the parallelization of the production, a scenario that implies new design paradigms is discussed. In order to realize this parallelization, mobile production entities work concurrently at the same primary structure of the fuselage. The present article proposes a software architecture for the control of such a production system. It is proposed that components are organized hierarchically. In enhancement to previous proposals, two perspectives of hierarchy are used here: grouping by functionality and grouping by timing context. The core of the architecture is a market-based multi-agent system, where the agents may operate in multiple timing contexts. Such a design yields advantages in terms of fast integration of new functionalities and scale-up of the production system. In brief, this article introduces a top-level control architecture for parallelized production of large reliable CFRP structures in a scalable production system.