An architecture for a fault tolerant highly reconfigurable shop floor

Nowadays Internet enabled technologies have open wide the door for penetrating new markets and profiting from specific business scenarios. In the manufacturing domain these opportunities are of volatile nature and rather than requiring large scale production of a single item demand mid/low volume production with variants of a certain good. The impact on the shop floor activities is considerable and calls for highly reconfigurable set ups. In this paper the authors propose an agent based architecture, which follows the reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) framework, validated by an implementation, in the discrete manufacturing domain, that supports seamless runtime reconfiguration while being tolerant to faults in running processes.