by Berend Denkena, Alessandro Battino, Peer-Oliver Woelk

Abstract

Since most of today’s industrial products are characterized by high complexity, sophisticated manufacturing processes and numerous customer-specific variants, modern manufacturing is in need of flexible and adaptive concepts for intelligent production. Thus, next-generation manufacturing systems have to take advantage of innovative information techniques in order to fulfil these demands. Furthermore, numerous products are too complex to be manufactured by a single company in an economical as well as efficient way today. Thus, next-generation manufacturing systems have to be distributed as well as collaborative, which will increase the demands concerning appropriate information technology even more. In this context, application of intelligent software agents is one of the most promising approaches for implementation of collaborative manufacturing systems. This paper will illustrate this approach by means of results of some selected research projects.

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