This spring, our company signed the first contract with Elektrum Production Complex for investigating the possibility of using multi-agent solutions to improve performance of production tasks.
The current stage of work is aimed at providing assessment and description of business processes, and preparing the basis for implementation of SmartEnterprise with the necessary modifications in production of transformer substations and other electrical products at the plant.
One of the key problems of production is inconsistency of plans of adjacent workshops, because of which some shops are overloaded, while others are idle due to uneven transfer of orders. During plan execution, a large number of changes occur because of cancellation of orders, changes in dates and picking. The proposed multi-agent system, integrated with the existing automation system based on 1C and modifications to it, will provide the following possibilities:
— quick response to unforeseen events,
— minimizing manual changes,
— taking into account dynamically changing situation, specifics of orders, features of existing machines and workers, etc.
These factors make the task of dispatching shop resources extremely complicated and time-consuming.
In addition, at any time users with appropriate authorities can intervene and interactively modify the plan, move operations by drag & drop, delete or add operations, mark the performed operations, etc. Thus, the plan will be automatically finalized, other operations will be pulled forward, redistributed or moved back. Accordingly, taking into account capabilities of other resources, new plans for workers will be formed.
As a result of this work, taking into account specific features of the enterprise, our company will propose coordinated solutions for production automation with the help of a multi-agent system, in cooperation with the sales department, planning group, shop and site managers, up to individual plans of foremen and workers.