CASOA: An Architecture for Agent-Based Manufacturing System in the Context of Industry 4.0

The fourth industrial revolution involves the advanced topics, such as industrial Internet of Things, cyber-physical system and smart manufacturing that address increasing demands for mass customized manufacturing. The agent-based manufacturing is a highly distributed control paradigm that can cope with these challenges well. This paper gives an overview of agent-based architectures for manufacturing systems. Besides, a cloud-assisted self-organized architecture is presented by comprising smart agents and cloud to communicate and negotiate through networks. Ontological representations of knowledge base are constructed to provide the information basis for decision-making of agents, which enables dynamic reconfiguration among agents in a collaborative way to achieve agility and flexibility. Furthermore, the agents’ interaction behavior is modeled to structure the agents hierarchically to reduce the complexity, because the interactions among agents in distributed system are difficult to understand and predict. The experimental results show that the presented architecture can be easily deployed to build smart manufacturing system and can improve the adaptiveness and robustness of the manufacturing system when dealing with mixed multi-product tasks.