Agent-based distributed measurement system for advanced manufacturing

Intelligent software agent technology has been widely used in manufacturing to make plants more agile and dynamic to satisfy frequently changed requirements from market. After illustrating agent applications in measurement and manufacturing, a multi-agent architecture for measurement system for advanced manufacturing with characteristics of distribution, collaboration and openness is presented, which enables not only to perform measurement dynamically and autonomously but also to facilitate optimization of global production goal. Such agent based measurement system is exemplified by size measurement system of train wheel. The existing software for data acquisition, motor driving is edited into DLL and reused in agent system. Some future works are also listed in the end of paper