Emergent flowshop control based on MASCADA agents

New concepts for manufacturing control are required to allow faster responses to unanticipated operational disruptions and reconfigurations. This paper presents a new approach based on agent technology to gain both disturbance and change management capabilities. In this scheme, agents operate within an information distribution environment as observable in biological insect societies and the overall control behavior emerges from the decision taking of single agents. It is shown how to specify the right set of agents for a control application, how these agents are coordinated in their behavior and how decision making takes place