Applications of Collective Behavior Concepts in Flexible Manufacturing Systems SZABÓ Loránd 1 , KÁPTALAN Erna 2 , SZÁSZ Csaba 3 1 Technical University of Cluj, Department of Electrical Machines 28 Memorandumului str., 400114 Cluj, Romania e-mail: Lorand.Szabo@mae.utcluj.ro 2 Babeş-Bolyai University, Department of Physics 1 Kogâlniceanu str., 400084 Cluj, Romania e-mail: kaptalane@yahoo.com 3 Technical University of Cluj, Department of Electrical Drives and Robots 28 Memorandumului str., 400114 Cluj, Romania e-mail: Csaba.Szasz@edr.utcluj.ro Abstract – Global competition and rapidly changing customer requirements are forcing major changes in advanced fabrication systems. Nowadays multi-agent technologies are considered as an important approach for working out highly developed flexible manufacturing systems. Nature is suitable sources of inspiration for this, since it can help researchers to achieve better solutions for self-adaptive and evolvable complex manufacturing systems. The present paper is a survey on diverse applications of collective behavior concepts in this field: multi-agents systems, holonic manufacturing systems, swarm robotics, etc. Keywords : flexible manufacturing systems, multi-agent systems, holonic manufacturing systems, swarm robotics. I. INTRODUCTION Modern manufacturing is characterized by low-volume, high-variety production and close-tolerance, high-quality products. In response to the ever-increasing competition in the global market, major efforts have been devoted to the research and development of various technologies to improve productivity and quality. The economic pressure for increasing quality, productivity, and efficiency of manufacturing processes has motivated the development of more complex and intelligent flexible manufacturing systems [1]. Aiming to address the emergent requirements imposed to the fabrication domain, a current challenge to design re-configurable and responsiveness manufacturing systems is to consider multi-agent and holonic designs by combining them with the insights offered by biological inspired techniques, as swarm intelligence and self-organization. By understanding how in nature the complex things are performed in a simple and effective way the researchers working in these fields may copy and develop complex and powerful adaptive and evolvable systems. Additionally, these concepts can be combined with insights from emergent theories from computer science, namely the artificial life and evolutionary computing [2]. II. THE MAIN REQUIREMENTS FOR ADVANCED FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS Nowadays the traditional centralized and sequential manufacturing planning, scheduling, and control mechanisms are being found insufficiently flexible to respond to changing production styles and highly dynamic variations in product requirements [3]. Unfortunately, the traditional production approaches imposes a limit on the expandability and reconfiguration capabilities of the manufacturing systems. The traditional, centralized and hierarchical manufacturing organization is also very sensible to shut downs due to failures. Agent technology provides a natural way to overcome such problems, and to design and implement advanced distributed and intelligent manufacturing systems [4]. Presently tremendous researches are carried out to apply agent based technology for advanced manufacturing enterprise integration, supply chain management, manufacturing planning, scheduling and control, materials handling, respectively to holonic manufacturing systems [5]. A detailed review on the main applications of agent-based systems in intelligent manufacturing systems is given in [6]. Manufacturing enterprises in our century must be high-tech environments where markets are frequently shifting, new technologies are continuously emerging, and competitors are multiplying globally. Therefore manufacturing strategies must shift to support global Journal of Computer Science and Control Systems 187 __________________________________________________________________________________________________________