I am a researcher for W3C/ERCIM, working from home in the UK, and interested in exploring ideas for simulating factories as multi-agent systems on behalf of the SmartEdge project, see: https://www.smart-edge.eu <https://www.smart-edge.eu/>.
The idea is to develop an open source 2.5D edutainment game that runs in the web browser, allowing the user to layout their own factory, declare how the different manufacturing cells relate to each other, and then run the simulation. The factory is created from a suite of components, e.g. conveyor belts, robot arms, autonomous mobile robots for moving workpieces from cell to cell, a variety of machinery for processing workpieces and so forth. The mobile robots use collision avoidance rules as they move to their destinations, acting like a swarm. The set of static and mobile agents are coordinated by a cognitive agent using chunks and rules drawing upon work I previously did for the Cognitive AI CG.
I used icograms designer to sketch how this would look in the browser:

The simulation involves asynchronous message passing using chunks, which in real-life factory could be delivered via HTTP over the factory’s VPN, e.g. a 5G private network. For the game, the biggest challenge is preparing the set of graphical components. If anyone would like to help drop me a line.
Best regards,
Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org>
