Towards an agent oriented smart manufacturing system

As recent rescission impact is still evident in the slow recovery of industry, restructuring for total visibility and agility is inevitable to sustaining competitive edge and steady growth. Endowed with total visibility, smart automation is quite essential for responsive manufacturing and efficient supply-chains. This work proposes a new model for building smart automation for manufacturing systems that blends flexible manufacturing with total visibility, distributed intelligence, rationality, collaboration and flow control. In this vein, the work exploits the coordinated, intelligent and rational aspects of smart tag and resource agents with RFID enabling technology. While smart tag agents manage visibility for agile process flow and supply-chain management, smart resource agents improve responsiveness in shop floors and across supply chains. A hybrid control model drives the smart manufacturing system that realizes a reactive-reflex control at operations level and an agent-oriented deliberative control at planning level. At technology level, the system realizes JADE development environment that hosts the smart controller layers.