The team have been in full flow following the Brokering Additive Manufacturing meeting and created the base code that turns AM machines into agents that can talk with another. At the moment they are simply saying hello but in the next few weeks they will be arguing and negotiating which jobs they are going to be printing from a global submission pool.
The demonstrator will enable us to realise different agent-based architectures and have real-world validation regarding their effectiveness. The appraoch is scaleable to hundreds of thousands of printers in distributed locations. Our next steps are to add more printers of different capabilities and makes, and to contact our colleagues at the University of West of England and University of Bath to see if we can connect a couple of their printers to the agent-based printer network.
Looking forward to seeing if they will play nicely together.
Please contact to found out more and if you have a printer that you want to trial with the system.