Development of an Intelligent Agent based Manufacturing System

Abstract

The new trend of the manufacturing system development is to apply autonomous behaviours inspired from biology for the manufacturing systems. In which, the resources of the manufacturing system are considered as biological organisms, which are autonomous entities so that the manufacturing system has the advanced characteristics inspired from biology such as self-adaptation, self-diagnosis, and self-optimization. To carry out these characteristics, the paper presents a paradigm about intelligent agent, called the cognitive agent and using cognitive agents for adapting to disturbances such as tool wear, machine breakdown that have happened on the shop floor. Modern manufacturing systems having the distributed control need autonomy and cooperation in solving problems of agents from agent technology, and cognitive capabilities for agents from cognitive technology. Cognitive agents combined from these two technologies are necessary for future manufacturing systems.