Integration of mobile agents in distributed manufacturing control

The paper presents an integration methodology for manufacturing resources and products based on the concept of agentification. This concept associates a software agent to a physical entity in order to simplify the access to its services. In the case of a manufacturing system the services offered by the resources and requested by the products are divided into two classes: material transportation and processing/assembly. Besides the software agent, the agentification assumes the existence of a dedicated program which realizes the synchronization with the agent framework. The methodology is validated using the JADE multi-agent framework for implementation. JADE agents feature a cyclic behaviour which receives standard FIPA messages from the multi-agent framework and writes data to the particular resource interface. Experimental results are reported.