Facilitating teamwork of autonomous systems with a distributed real-time knowledge base

Flexible planning and control of a factory requires concepts for the representation of the local and global knowledge of the autonomous systems working in teams. Therefore, the author developed a distributed real-time knowledge base that facilitates team work of autonomous systems in flexible manufacturing environments. The knowledge base consists of several local knowledge bases cooperating with each other. In each local knowledge base the knowledge is represented as an object structure with demons. If several autonomous systems cooperate to perform a certain task, the local knowledge bases of these autonomous systems form a team to provide the knowledge needed by the autonomous systems. First applications with single local knowledge bases have been successfully implemented