A Brokering-Based Interaction Protocol for Dynamic Resource Allocation in Steel Production Processes

Steel manufacturing involves a series of dynamic processes that require an efficient and effective management of the plant resources. The coordination and the allocation of the resources is an important aspect for ensuring a continuous production flow as well as a good quality of the final products, especially when unexpected events can compromise the overall system performance. This paper presents an agent-based protocol for dynamic resource allocation in order to establish collaboration among agents within steel production processes. The proposed protocol is based on the brokering mechanism and is designed in order to solve the problem of the concurrency, which arises when several agents are interested in using the same resources, and to handle dynamic changes, such as unexpected events that can affect the resource allocation process. Experimental results show how the designed protocol allows the agents coordination by guaranteeing the use of the resources and the correct flow of the production.