Trends in Intelligent Manufacturing Systems

A lot of changes in the manufacturing sector will occur in the future and it is important to transform the actual production systems to evolvable production systems. Fractal, bionic and holonic manufacturing systems are three concepts that have been proposed due their characteristics of flexibility and intelligence. This generation of manufacturing systems is known as intelligent manufacturing systems (IMS). Agent-based software is a technology that can make actions of control or supervision, endowing mechatronics devices with some intelligence. The use of multi-agent based software in operation and control of distributed systems is offering new distributed intelligent control functions (cooperation, planning, scheduling) over wired or wireless networked systems. In this paper, underlying principles of the construction of an IMS are concisely presented.