Modeling smart sensor integrated manufacturing systems

Smart sensors and their networking technology when applied in manufacturing environment for monitoring, diagnostics, and control and for data/information collection could dwarf all the advances made so far by the manufacturing community through traditional sensors. Smart sensors can significantly contribute to improving automation and reliability through high sensitivity, self-calibration and compensation of non-linearity, low-power operation, digital pre-processed output, self-checking and diagnostic modes, and compatibility with computers and other subsystem blocks. There is a huge gulf between the existing models of manufacturing systems and the computational models that are required to correctly characterize manufacturing systems integrated with smart sensor networks. This paper proposes a multi-agent model for S2IM system. The agent characteristics and the expected model behavior are presented.