Description
This article is concerned with the control of the production of aircraft primary structures made of carbon ï¬bre reinforced plastics. To increase the parallelization of the production, a scenario that implies new design para- digms is discussed. In order to realize this parallelization, mobile production entities work concurrently at the same primary structure of the fuselage. The present article pro- poses a software architecture for the control of such a production system. It is proposed that components are organized hierarchically. In enhancement to previous pro- posals, 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 pro- duction system. In brief, this article introduces a top-level control architecture for parallelized production of large reliable CFRP structures in a scalable production system.
