Queueless: Agent-Based Manufacturing for Workshop Production

Workshops are vital to product development, supporting prototyping, research & development, bespoke and small-batch production, and education. They are composed of diverse manufacturing capability that needs to meet varied, rapid, diverse and often random changes in demand. The diversity in both composition and demand continues to challenge the optimal processing of jobs leading to considerable delays and dissatisfaction with workshop services. In this paper, we examine how a workshop can optimally utilise its manufacturing capability through an agent-based approach. We show that a relatively simple set of agent logics can provide considerable configurability and ability to optimise a workshop of twenty machines meeting a step-change in demand. Appropriate configuration can result in a 40% change in mean Time in System and 20% change in the number of jobs delayed.