SOPRO - Advancements in the self-organising production

Rising demands to smaller lot sizes and more flexibility in production processes inspired the idea of self-organising production by the use of “intelligent” parts. This is achieved by self-sustaining wireless nodes - Process-eGrains - to transfer the production control and logic from a centralised approach to a distributed logic. This paper will show the requirements in an industrial environment from an application perspective to these nodes. We present the middleware design implemented on an agent-driven architecture. Abstracting from different hardware it provides a unified interface for storing and processing information independently and locally and negotiate among each other. The application is exemplified through a part driven assembly.