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Discrete Event Simulation of Biological Control Processes and its Application to Autonomous Decision-Making in Manufacturing Systems
ESPRC Funded Project

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Research methodology

The bacterial flagellar assembly process has been chosen because:

  1. It involves the building of an extended structure, ‘on demand’, according to a clear ‘plan’, with ‘just-in-time’ supply of materials, resources and assembly sequences.
  2. It is exceptionally well characterized [13], both genetically and mechanistically. There is a wealth of data available on the structure and function of the associated regulons (genes-regulatory unit combinations), transcription rates and order, transcriptional and translational control, signalling, and metabolic activity.
  3. Many phenomena associated with biological control make an appearance, such as master genes, promoters, repression and activation, sigma-factors, checkpoints, chaperones, and production and degradation control.

In respect to achieving the first main aim, ie MA1, an approach to be explored is the feasibility of developing an e-genome that, like its biological counterpart, consists of a sequence of individual genes each of which represents a ‘unit of resource’ required for manufacturing operations to take place. The basic ‘unit of resource’ types available would include materials, processing equipment and manual operator skills. Examples of ‘units of resource’ would include ‘a unit of time on an item of processing equipment’, ‘a unit of raw material used within a product manufactured within the system’ and ‘a unit of time for a specific maintenance task on an item of processing equipment’.

The task of the biologically-inspired control system would be to ‘express’ these ‘units of resource’ such that resource types were available at a specific point in time, at a specific location and in the required quantities such that manufacturing processing could take place. Designing these controls would initially be an iterative process of modelling and experimental testing using discrete event simulation that would continue until the control system achieves the desired behaviour.