A swarm of cognitive agents for controlling smart manufacturing systems

Disturbances in the manufacturing environment such as machine breakdown, controller malfunction, urgent jobs, and so on reduce the productivity; increase the downtime of the machining system. In order to solve these problems, new strategies and technologies are applied. The paper presents a new technology called cognitive agent to control the machining system. Cognitive agents with intelligent behaviors such as perception, reasoning, and cooperation allow the manufacturing to overcome the disturbances. For cooperation among cognitive agents, ant colony optimization was proposed. The machining system controlled by swarm of cognitive agents was tested successfully in the case of disturbances.