Agent-based control system for next generation manufacturing

Future manufacturing systems will be required to be agile, flexible and fault-tolerant. The next-generation intelligent manufacturing systems will be multi-agent systems containing distributed control and application entities that dynamically collaborate to satisfy both local and global objectives. This paper focuses on the development of a generic control system design based on IEC-1499 function block standards, for real-time distributed manufacturing environments. The paper first describes the related research into the control system architecture using multi-agent cooperation, then reports on the intelligent controller design interface and automatic control code generation.