Samenvatting

Standard mass-production is a well-known manufacturing
concept. To make small quantities or even single items of
a product according to user specifications at an affordable price,
alternative agile production paradigms should be investigated and
developed. The system presented in this article is based on a
grid of cheap reconfigurable production units, called equiplets.
A grid of these equiplets is capable to produce a variety
of different products in parallel at an affordable price. The
underlying agent-based software for this system is responsible
for the agile manufacturing. An important aspect of this type
of manufacturing is the transport of the products along the
available equiplets. This transport of the products from equiplet
to equiplet is quite different from standard production. Every
product can have its own unique path along the equiplets. In this
article several topologies are discussed and investigated. Also, the
planning and scheduling in relation to the transport constraints is
subject of this study. Some possibilities of realization are discussed
and simulations are used to generate results with the focus on
efficiency and usability for different topologies and layouts of
the grid and its internal transport system. Closely related with
this problem is the scheduling of the production in the grid. A
discussion about the maximum achievable load on the production
grid and its relation with the transport system is also included.