Supporting Product Oriented Manufacturing: a Model Driven and Agent based Approach

Product oriented manufacturing is aligned with one of the Industry 4.0 trends consisting of integrating all production systems. This implies shifting from a traditional view of manufacturing processes focused on production line in order to reduce costs, to a more flexible and customized product manufacturing. On the other hand, Multi Agent Systems (MAS) have been proved to be a suitable way to fulfill these requirements. However, a key aspect of the use of novel technologies is to offer methodologies and tools for supporting the implementation of such systems. In this sense, this paper uses Model Driven Engineering and MAS technology to propose an architecture that is able to launch and execute a manufacturing execution plan. It focuses on the information models managed by architecture agents that can be customized to particular manufacturing plants as well as on the definition of agent templates.