An intelligent and adaptive modelling and configuration approach to manufacturing systems control

As the world market is becoming turbulent, global and customer driven responsiveness has become an important issue for manufacturing organisations. The main aim of this paper is to present a novel and dynamic control strategy that enables manufacturing organisations to survive to become and pre-eminent in a turbulent market environment. This control strategy is concerned with manufacturing system modelling and configuration. A review of existing manufacturing system modelling approaches has been carried out, which shows that these approaches are incapable of facilitating the maximisation of system responsiveness in response to market changes and unforeseen circumstances. Therefore an intelligent and adaptive modelling and configuration approach, termed autonomous agent network (AAN), is proposed. AAN is implemented as clusters of distributed intelligent agents. Agents have the capabilities of responding to the environment, reasoning, decision-making, negotiating among themselves to resolve given problems, and communicating with one another.