TABLE OF CONTENTS Today's manufacturing systems must be capable of quickly responding to change while maintaining stable and efficient operation. Although manufacturing technology has become increasingly sophisticated to deal with this (e.g., through advanced robotics and computer numerical control), without adequate control the result is often a collection of "islands of automation" that lack the necessary integration for truly responsive behaviour [UPT 95]. As a result, new control software and hardware approaches are required to realise a system that is flexible (i.e., capable of reconfiguration) and responsive (i.e., capable of recovering from disturbances).
In this contribution, we report on the development of a distributed intelligent control solution that is inherently adaptable and dynamically re-configurable, that takes advantage of distributed artificial intelligence at the planning and control levels to achieve significantly shorter up-front commissioning times as well as significantly more responsiveness to change. These potential benefits, in combination with the current trend towards low-cost, distributed computing platforms will result in a much more attractive, low-cost automation solution for future manufacturers than current centralised solutions.
We begin with some background on holonic and agent-based approaches in manufacturing as well as recent work on real-time distributed control. Then, in Section 4, we describe two approaches that can be used to achieve dynamic and intelligent reconfiguration in this environment. In Section 4 we describe a simple prototype system that is used...
