Intelligent Manufacturing Systems: a methodology for technological migration

More complex products in e-ciency and quality, the necessity of diminish energy spending and investment reduction; amongst other things, are dis- turbances, and their occurrence may have severe im- pact in the performance of actual manufacturing sys- tems. Manufacturing systems should be based in dis- tributed and autonomous entities, being possible the addition of new components without stopping or re- starting processes. All these facilities point to the concept of agile manufacturing systems. The ap- proach is addressed to encourage the usage of holonic and multi-agent concepts in traditional production lines, with a friendly software upgrade and a min- imum cost in hardware expansion. A methodology that includes the technological migration from a es- tablished ∞exible manufacturing structure (FMS) to intelligent and reconflgurable manufacturing system (RMS) is presented. An example of implementation will be described in depth to show the viability of the proposed schema.