Multi-agent and Holonic Techniques for Manufacturing Systems: Technologies and Applications

摘要

Nowadays the manufacturing sector faces a fundamental change from a vendor's to a customer's market. The manufacturer's success is no more measured by their ability to cost-effectively produce a single product; success now seems to be measured in terms of flexibility, agility and versatility. The new requirements for manufacturing systems have motivated researchers in academia and industry to create and exploit new production paradigms on the basis of autonomy and co-operation because both concepts are necessary to create flexible behaviour and thus to adapt to the changing production conditions. Such technologies provide a natural way to overcome these problems, and to design and implement distributed intelligent manufacturing environments. Agent based manufacturing systems, and holonic manufacturing systems are considered as important approaches for developing industrial distributed systems.