An autonomous agent approach for manufacturing execution control systems

Recently, environments surrounding the manufacturing systems are changing very rapidly. Flexibility is one of the key features in future manufacturing systems. The traditional hierarchical systems used in manufacturing systems has difficulty satisfying this demand since they deal poorly with unexpected situations. To achieve flexibility in manufacturing systems, the concept of an autonomous decentralized system is useful. We introduce agents that work autonomously in the system to build an autonomous decentralized manufacturing system. This paper describes the concept and software architecture of the agent-based manufacturing control system we propose. The system introduces dispatching mechanism for execution control level in the manufacturing systems. We also explain a prototype system actually developed for Shape Deposition Manufacturing Laboratory in Carnegie Mellon University. Some improvement is proposed from the problems we found during the development of the prototype system.