Intelligent manufacturing system control

Next generation intelligent manufacturing systems are envisioned to be agile, flexible and fault tolerant. They will be comprised of dynamically reconfigurable factories having decentralized and virtual organization structure. The constituent resources will be capable of addressing both the knowledge processing and material processing requirements simultaneously. In such an environment, the control relationships among the resources will be ever changing, maintained only as long as necessary and reconfigured on the fly. In this paper, the requirements for intelligent control of such systems are identified and the implementation issues are discussed