Towards exchanging monitoring data in flexible and distributed factory organization structures

The evolution of Industry 4.0 standards and trends introduces new challenges for traditional Manufacturing Execution Systems, necessitating their transformation into modular, interconnected components with standardized communication interfaces. Although these trends provide a conceptual framework, a distributed architecture for monitoring and aggregating production data remains underdeveloped. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a system of distributed monitoring components that interact hierarchically and heterarchically using Industry 4.0 technologies. The approach integrates Asset Administration Shells for passive data representation with Multi-Agent Systems and investigates its applicability for different control system architectures in different case studies.