research-article

Distributed optimization in multi-agent robotics for industry 4.0 warehouses

Authors:

Hemant Kumar Rath,

Arijit MukherjeeAuthors Info & Claims

SAC '18: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

Pages 808 - 815

https://doi.org/10.1145/3167132.3167221

Published: 09 April 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Robotic automation is being increasingly proselytized in the industrial and manufacturing sectors to increase production efficiency. Typically, complex industrial tasks cannot be satisfied by individual robots, rather coordination and information sharing is required. Centralized robotic control and coordination is ill-advised in such settings, due to high failure probabilities, inefficient overheads and lack of scalability. In this paper, we model the interactions among robotic units using intelligent agent based interactions. The autonomous behavior of these agents requires task/resource allocation to be performed via distributed algorithms. We use the motivating example of warehouse inventory automation to optimally allocate and distribute delivery tasks among multiple robotic agents. The optimization is decomposed using primal and dual decomposition techniques to operate in minimal latency, minimal battery usage or maximal utilization scenarios. These techniques may be applied to multiple deployments involving coordination and task allocation between autonomous agents.

References

[1]

M. Hermann, T. Pentek and B. Otto, "Design Principles for Industrie 4.0 Scenarios", 49th Hawaii Intl. Conf. on System Sciences, 2016.

Digital Library

[2]

S. Greengard, "The Internet of Things", MIT, 2015.

Digital Library

[3]

M. Hompel and T. Schmidt, "Warehouse Management: Automation and Organization of Warehouse and Order Picking Systems", Springer-Verlag, 2012.

Digital Library

[4]

J. Bartholdi and S. Hackman, "Warehouse and Distribution Science", The Supply Chain and Logistics Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2016.

[5]

V. Marik & D. McFarlane, "Industrial Adoption of Agent-Based Technologies", IEEE Intelligent Manufacturing Control, 2005.

[6]

W. Shen, "Distributed Manufacturing Scheduling using Intelligent Agents", IEEE Intelligent Systems, 2002.

Digital Library

[7]

R. Luo, K. Su, S. Shen and K. Tsai, "Networked intelligent robots through the Internet: issues and opportunities", IEEE Magazine, vol. 91, no. 3, pp. 371--382, 2003.

[8]

G. Hu, W. Tay and Y. Wen, "Cloud robotics: architecture, challenges and applications", IEEE Network, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 21--28, 2012.

[9]

K. Sycara, "Multiagent Systems", AI Magazine: Intelligent Agents, vol. 19, No. 2, 1998.

[10]

Y. Shoham and K. Leyton-Brown, "Multiagent Systems: Algorithmic, Game-Theoretic, and Logical Foundations", Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Digital Library

[11]

JDA Warehouse Management System (WMS), https://jda.com/solutions/profitable-omni-channel-retail-solutions/intelligent-fulfillment/warehouse-management, 2017.

[12]

W. Shen, Q. Hao, H. Yoon and D. Norrie, "Applications of agent-based systems in intelligent manufacturing: An updated review", Advanced Engineering Informatics vol. 20, pp. 415--431, 2006.

[13]

B. Brummit, "A Mission Planning System for Multiple Mobile Robotics in Unknown, Unstructured, and Changing Environments", tech. report CMU-RI-TR-98-42, Carnegie Mellon University, 1998.

[14]

L. Panait and S. Luke, "Cooperative Multi-Agent Learning: The State of the Art", Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 11, pp. 387--434, 2005.

Digital Library

[15]

T. Sandholm, "An Implementation of the Contract Net Protocol Based on Marginal Cost Calculations," University of Massachusetts, 1993.

[16]

A. Kattepur, H. Dohare, V. Mushunuri, H. Rath and A. Simha, "Resource Constrained Offloading in Fog Computing", ACM Middleware Workshops, 2016.

Digital Library

[17]

D. Palomar and M. Chiang, "A Tutorial on Decomposition Methods for Network Utility Maximization", IEEE J. on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 24. no. 8, 2006.

Digital Library

[18]

H. Terelius, U. Topcu and R. Murray, "Decentralized Multi-Agent Optimization via Dual Decomposition", IFAC Proceedings Volumes, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 11245---11251, 2011.

[19]

A. Nedic and A. Ozdaglar, "Cooperative distributed multi-agent optimization", Convex Optimization in Signal Processing and Communications, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

[20]

M. Fletcher, R. Brennan and D. Norrie, "Modeling and reconfiguring intelligent holonic manufacturing systems with Internet-based mobile agents," J. of Intelligent Manufacturing, no. 14, vol. 1, pp. 7--23, 2003.

[21]

A. Cardon, T. Galinho and J. Vacher "Genetic algorithms using multi-objectives in a multi-agent system," Robotics and Autonomous Systems, no. 33, pp. 179--190, 2000.

[22]

P. Wurman, R. D'Andrea and M. Mountz, "Coordinating Hundreds of Cooperative, Autonomous Vehicles in Warehouses", AAAI Artificial Intelligence Mag., vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 9--19, 2008.

Digital Library

[23]

B. Hardgrave, J. Aloysius and S. Goyal, "Does RFID improve inventory accuracy? A preliminary analysis", Intl. J. of RF Technologies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 44--56, 2009.

[24]

S. Boyd and L. Vandenberghe, "Convex Optimization", Cambridge University Press, 2004.

[25]

R. Rao, S. Vrudhula and D. Rakhmatov,"Battery Modeling for Energy-Aware System Design", IEEE Computer, vol. 36, no. 12, 2003.

Digital Library

[26]

A. Hausmann and C. Depcik, "Expanding the Peukert equation for battery capacity modeling through inclusion of a temperature dependency", J. of Power Sources, vol. 235, pp 148--158, 2013.

Cited By

Alherimi NSaihi ABen-Daya M(2024)A Systematic Review of Optimization Approaches Employed in Digital Warehousing TransformationIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.346353112(145809-145831)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3463531
Tubis ARohman J(2023)Intelligent Warehouse in Industry 4.0—Systematic Literature ReviewSensors10.3390/s2308410523:8(4105)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/s23084105
Venancio Teixeira Jda Silva Hounsell MWildgrube Bertol D(2023)How CPS and Autonomous Robots are Integrated to other I4.0 Technologies: a systematic literature reviewProduction & Manufacturing Research10.1080/21693277.2023.227971511:1Online publication date: 18-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1080/21693277.2023.2279715
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Distributed optimization in multi-agent robotics for industry 4.0 warehouses

Recommendations

Multi-agent robot systems as distributed autonomous systems

In the numerous existing studies dealing with multi-agent robot systems, the systems are positioned on the crossover area of robotics and distributed autonomous systems. Multi-agent robots perform many tasks, which are classified into six types ...
Self-Organizing Agent Coalitions in Distributed Multi-agent Systems
CICN '10: Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Communication Networks

Self-Organization refers to the process through which a system changes its internal organization to adapt to changes in its goals & the environment, without explicit external control. The self-organizing capability seen in many natural and artificial ...
A Plan Based Coalition Formation Model for Multi-agent Systems
WI-IAT '11: Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 02

This article addresses the coalition formation problem in a multi-agent context where agents plan their activities dynamically and use these plans to coordinate their actions and form suitable coalitions. In most coalition formation methods, when ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SAC '18: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

April 2018

2327 pages

ISBN:9781450351911

DOI:10.1145/3167132

Conference Chairs:
Hisham M. Haddad
Kennesaw State University
,
Roger L. Wainwright
University of Tulsa
,
Richard Chbeir
University of Pau & Pays Adour, France

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGAPP: ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 April 2018

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

SAC 2018

Sponsor:

SIGAPP

SAC 2018: Symposium on Applied Computing

April 9 - 13, 2018

Pau, France

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

Upcoming Conference

SAC '25

Sponsor:
sigapp

The 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing

March 31 - April 4, 2025

Catania , Italy

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

12
Total Citations
View Citations
552
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)44
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3

Reflects downloads up to 06 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Alherimi NSaihi ABen-Daya M(2024)A Systematic Review of Optimization Approaches Employed in Digital Warehousing TransformationIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.346353112(145809-145831)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3463531
Tubis ARohman J(2023)Intelligent Warehouse in Industry 4.0—Systematic Literature ReviewSensors10.3390/s2308410523:8(4105)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/s23084105
Venancio Teixeira Jda Silva Hounsell MWildgrube Bertol D(2023)How CPS and Autonomous Robots are Integrated to other I4.0 Technologies: a systematic literature reviewProduction & Manufacturing Research10.1080/21693277.2023.227971511:1Online publication date: 18-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1080/21693277.2023.2279715
Tada KHayashi NTakai S(2023)Distributed online primal-dual subgradient method on unbalanced directed networksAdvanced Robotics10.1080/01691864.2023.228580638:9-10(591-602)Online publication date: 23-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1080/01691864.2023.2285806
Yildirim AReefke HAktas EYildirim AReefke HAktas E(2023)Managerial Decision FrameworkMobile Robot Automation in Warehouses10.1007/978-3-031-12307-8_7(103-120)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12307-8_7
Yildirim AReefke HAktas EYildirim AReefke HAktas E(2023)Operational Decisions in Mobile Robot AutomationMobile Robot Automation in Warehouses10.1007/978-3-031-12307-8_6(81-101)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12307-8_6
Yildirim AReefke HAktas EYildirim AReefke HAktas E(2023)Tactical Decisions in Mobile Robot AutomationMobile Robot Automation in Warehouses10.1007/978-3-031-12307-8_5(69-79)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12307-8_5
Yildirim AReefke HAktas EYildirim AReefke HAktas E(2023)Mobile Robot Systems and Their EvaluationMobile Robot Automation in Warehouses10.1007/978-3-031-12307-8_3(17-47)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12307-8_3
Yildirim AReefke HAktas EYildirim AReefke HAktas E(2023)IntroductionMobile Robot Automation in Warehouses10.1007/978-3-031-12307-8_1(1-10)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12307-8_1
Teli RPrasad S(2020)Delivering Value in Procurement With Robotic Cognitive Automation (RCA) ServicesRobotic Systems10.4018/978-1-7998-1754-3.ch084(1773-1785)Online publication date: 2020
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-1754-3.ch084
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten