An Ontology to Support Adaptive Agents for Complex Manufacturing Systems

In this paper, we extend the FABMAS ontology towards its usage in adaptive production control systems for complex manufacturing systems. FABMAS is a hierarchically organized multi-agent-system for production control in the semiconductor manufacturing domain. It consists of decision-making and staff agents. Staff agents support the decision-making agents. We introduce adaptive staff agents. Adaptive staff agents make sure that the parameters of production control algorithms are properly adjusted in a situation-dependent manner. We derive necessary extensions of the FABMAS ontology based on the architecture of adaptive staff agents and their interaction with other agents of the manufacturing control system. We present an example for using the ontology within FABMAS.