Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
a free time slot of a required time frame exists in a specific period. If the
space is occupied, then the bath can tell which agent is blocking. A bath
has no possibility to prioritize or assign time to individual agents, or to
push or cancel time already assigned. It is the responsibility of the agents
to fight for time slots themselves.
•
Agents
. The recipe for each bar of items is split into a number of agents.
One agent is created for each step of the recipe, and all agents made from
the recipe form a group. An agent is born with some knowledge, as it
knows which kind of bath it must visit, it holds the allowed minimum
and maximum time to stay in the bath, and it knows its predecessor and
successor agent of the group. It does not know the rest of the agents in the
group and it has no way of communicating with them. Thus, the scope of
the agent within its group is rather limited, which simplifies the interaction
model.
To succeed, an agent must visit a bath of the right type, but not necessarily at
the right time. The agent has a size equal to the time slot it occupies in the bath.
Therefore by its representation, agents can be seen as physical manifestations of
the problem in focus. Two bars
q
i
and
q
j
, split up into two groups of agents,
q
i,
1
,q
i,
2
,...,q
i,
1
,q
i,
2
,...,q
i,n
,and
q
j,
1
,q
j,
2
,...,q
j,m
added to the model in
random places it could look like Figure 3.25.
12.2.1 Perception, Communication, and Action Fields
As stated earlier, the PACO paradigm defines three delimited fields of how PACO
agents experience the world: the perception, communication, and action fields.
•
The perception field
consists of the predecessor of the bar, as the movement
of that agent affects the forces (described later in this section) applied to an
agent. Furthermore, the agents above and below (in the time domain) that
want to visit the same bath are also observed, to avoid overlap of agents
in the same bath.
U
i
U
i
+ 1
U
i
+ 2
U
i
+ 3
U
i
+ 4
q
i,
1
q
j,
1
q
j,
2
q
j,
3
q
i,
3
q
i,
2
Figure 3.25
Three agents from each agent group occupying timeslots in the baths
Search WWH ::
Custom Search