INTEGRATED PROCESS PLANNING AND PRODUCTION CONTROL BASED ON THE APPLICATION OF INTELLIGENT AGENTS

Modern manufacturing is in need of flexible and adaptive concepts for process planning, production control, and scheduling. However, strong borderlines exist in industrial production caused by an extreme specialisation and seperated historical paths of system evolution. Thus, a gap exists between the involved systems, which implies loss of time and information and in consequence a prolonged time-to-market. The application of methods from "Distributed Artificial Intelligence" (especially of multiagent systems) is very promising to improve information logistics between process planning and production scheduling. This approach is used by an ongoing research project and will be discussed in this paper.