As discussed in Chapter 2, the role of MASs in manufacturing seems more appropriate in cases in which production activities are affected by dynamic variations or involve complex decisions, and in instances in which the agents are adopted to make systems interoperate, playing a role of intelligent middleware components. In addition, agent technology can be applied by introducing two different classes of agents: business component agents and synthetic social agents. The main characteristic of the former is to fit exactly into one task or a subset of tasks required to carry out a business process, whereas the latter is usually introduced to tackle complex decisions, decentralizing the decisional capabilities among the different actors of the decision process and modeling this process by means of a social collaboration/competition paradigm. This chapter discusses the application of such modeling considerations from three different standpoints that are respectively associated with the business processes or the complex decisions pertinent to the planning, scheduling, and control in manufacturing.

Among the various application areas that may require one of these activities in a manufacturing enterprise, this chapter will focus on the operational level of a manufacturing system, the one commonly referred to as the execution layer (defined as MES by MESA-11 standard [1], [2] or manufacturing operations and control level as defined in the ANSI/ISA-95 [3] specifications). This choice stems from three considerations:

• The need for applications to confront planning, scheduling, and control problems seems to co-exist in the execution layer.

• Although the role...