A Flexible Multi-Agent System Architecture for Plant Automation

Flexibility has become a key factor for manufacturing to keep competitive. software agent technology can be widely used to improve the flexibility of a plant and the manufacturing execution system (MES) used to control production. This paper introduces a multi-agent system design consisting of four types of agents covering the three layers of the plant automation pyramid from enterprise resource planning (ERP), manufacturing execution system (MES), to the field control layer. The architecture and the communication protocols of each agent are presented and the increase in flexibility for mass customized and highly dynamically changing products such as car manufacturing or manifold production are given.