Intelligent agents in manufacturing automation

The concept of using autonomous intelligent agents in automated manufacturing processes has been recognised as having the potential to provide benefits in terms of production scheduling and faster recovery of plant systems in the event of a failure. The implementation of these ideas within production systems, however, are hampered by the technology available at present for programming industrial control systems, as well as a reluctance by users to accept alternative working practices and techniques. This presentation presents an overview of current software design techniques used in manufacturing industry, outline some of the new approaches which are starting to become available and present the commercial and technical challenges which need to be addressed before manufacturing systems based on intelligent agents can be implemented in practice.