A trust model to form teams of agentified AGVs in workshop areas

Smart Workshops are experiencing the need of a mobile intelligence for mining both learning patterns and knowledge from the wide sea of data generated by both mobile users and mobile technologies. Indeed, mobile intelligence would represent the ideal substratum for providing "agentified" robots with a plethora of advanced capabilities (e.g., visual recognition, fault detection, self-recovery) and, hence, with high-level functionalities, like production line control, asset movement, connectivity restore. Besides the operational plane, however, mobile intelligence can be successfully exploited also in organizational tasks, like the formation of temporary, ad-hoc teams for accomplishing a given target. The complexity of some industrial operations, indeed, often demands the involvement of several, heterogeneous group of robots and the adequate representation of the reciprocal trustworthiness represents a key pre-requisite. It holds particularly for the Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) which are increasingly involved in collaborative activities aimed to optimise storage, picking, and transport functions in a wide variety of workshop areas. Therefore, in this paper we define a trustworthiness model for agentified AGVs based on the mix of their reputation and reliability and we present an agent-based framework implementing the related team formation strategy. The improvements obtained in terms of effectiveness and efficiency from the AGV team are observed and measured through a simulation activity, in which realistic settings for an industrial applications have been considered.