In this work, the initial steps for implementing the novel production paradigm of swarm production have been made.
The system consists of 5 PolyBot mobile robots acting as carrier robots for material handling, 4 virtual workstations for part processing, and a central swarm manager.
Three different traffic management strategies have been implemented and tested, one of these being the novel concept of dynamic queue positions.
Testing of the traffic management strategies shows that those considering the temporal dimension are more suited for swarm production, similar to solutions found for the multi-agent-path-finding/multiagent-pickup-and-delivery problem.
Furthermore, dynamic queue points were found to potentially improve the scalability of a swarm production system.
Future work includes scaling up the number of robots, and further iteration of the system.