Doctoral Defence

Location

Arenbergkasteel
Kasteelpark Arenberg 1
3001 Heverlee
Belgium
(directions)

Program

June 30th 2005 17.00

Probabilistic Approaches in Multi-Agent Systems for Manufacturing Coordination and Control - Doctoral Defence - Olaf Bochmann (abstract; full text; slides; handouts)

June 30th 2005 19.00

Reception

see also: and now? ... post doctoral depression?

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the goals of robust, adaptive, scalable, dynamic and distributed agent systems and their application in manufacturing control. A synthesis of methods from dynamical systems theory, computation theory and inductive inference has been developed that suggests a constructive approach to address the problem of emergent computation. Most applications of multi-agent systems in manufacturing control use the term emergence in a rather vague fashion, describing a process where macro-level behavior arises from the interaction of some micro-level components. The actual cause for this emergent phenomenon - the intrinsic computation of the process - has not yet been taken into account.
In this context, the multi-agent system is understood in the sense of an agent based model where each thing is represented as an agent in a population of distinctive agents. Agents observe their environment and reconstruct a model based on patterns that reflect the structure in which the process stores and transforms information. This unique model - it is minimal in complexity and maximal in predictive power - is used in forecasting the manufacturing process. This pattern that allows for a large reduction in complexity a small reduction in accuracy is the emergent phenomenon in forecasting.

Contents

1. Introduction
1. Topic and its relevance
2. Problem statement and ob jectives
3. Outline of the following chapters
4. Contribution of this research work
2. Current State of Play in Manufacturing
1. Introduction
2. Scheduling
3. Scheduling Ob jective
4. Performance Measures
5. Scheduling Algorithms
6. Reinforcement Learning in Job-Shop Scheduling
7. Forecasting
8. Summary and Conclusion
3. Multi-Agent Manufacturing Coordination and Control
1. Introduction
2. Agent Model
3. Agent-Based Modelling
4. Summary
4. Probabilistic Methods: Modelling Uncertainty in Manufacturing Systems
1. Introduction
2. Frequentist and Bayesian Approaches
3. Bayesian Networks
4. Hidden Markov Models
5. Influence Diagrams
6. Summary
5. Complexity and Complexity Measures
1. Introduction: The Intuitive Notation of Complexity
2. Algorithmic and Computational Complexity
3. Logical Depth
4. Thermodynamic Depth
5. Statistical Complexity
6. Information Theory
7. Complexity in Manufacturing Systems
8. Summary and Conclusions
6. Emergence and Self-Organization
1. Introduction
2. Computational Mechanics
3. Epsilon-Machine
4. Quantification of Emergence and Self-Organization
5. Summary
7. Forecasting in Manufacturing Processes
1. Introduction
2. Pattern Discovery to Predict Future
3. Evaluation of the Derived Process
4. Decision making in the forecasting process
5. Summary
8. Distributed Decision Making in Manufacturing Control
1. Introduction
2. Scheduling Process
3. Predictor of Scheduling Processes
4. Measure of Self-Organization
5. Numerical Experiments and Results
6. Conclusion
9. Results and Discussion
1. Summary
2. Conclusion
3. Application and Future Work

Citation

Bibliography Entry

Please cite this thesis as follows:
O. Bochmann. Probabilistic Approaches in Multi-Agent Systems for Manufacturing Coordination and Control. PhD thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Leuven, Belgium, 2005.

BibTeX Record

You can use this BibTeX record:

@phdthesis{Bochmann-PhD:05,
 Address = {Leuven, Belgium},
 Author = {Olaf Bochmann},
 Month = {June},
 School = {Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Department of Mechanical Engineering},
 Title = {Probabilistic Approaches in Multi-Agent Systems for Manufacturing 
                           Coordination and Control},
 Year = {2005}}

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Download

Full Text

You can download the thesis as pdf-file as it was printed in the book 2005-06-09.

Earlier Versions

Earlier versions are available as it was as submitted to the doctoral committee by 2005-03-31 [download dvi-file, ps-file, pdf-file] and as it was submitted to the doctoral committee by 2004-07-01 [download dvi-file, ps-file, pdf-file].
Copyright © 2005 by Olaf Bochmann.