MULTI-AGENT ARCHITECTURE BASED ON AUCTION PROTOCOL FOR A WIRE ROD MILL ROLLS REPLACEMENT SYSTEM

Wire rod rolling is a complex manufacturing process where the raw material goes through a set of rolls assembled along the process line. One of the most important tasks is to determine the rolls to be assembled to make the desired product with the required dimensions and quality properties. The process has a series of determining factors which make this process complex: the number of assembled rolls is high (more than one hundred when all the rolling mill set is replaced) and this kind of mills has several sections, each one with specific requirements depending both the position where they are going to be assembled and the kind of product to be rolled, as well as diameter restrictions for the rolls. The inventory of rolls in this kind of facilities is very high. The process managers have to manage thousands of them, and the decision-making process is complex because each one has specific features (dimensions, geometries, alloys). Due to such complexity, there is a clear need for a decision support tool. This is a constraint satisfaction problem that can be faced with multi-agent systems. This paper presents a model for solving this problem based on a new multi-agent auction protocol.