New revolutionary manufacturing paradigms, which take advantage of the newest emerging mechatronics, information, and communication technologies, and integrate them in a highly dynamic and agile economic, technical, and organizational manufacturing environment, are being researched and developed since the last decade of the 20th century. This new generation of manufacturing systems is referenced as intelligent manufacturing systems (IMS), and both the "holonic manufacturing system" (HMS) and the "agent-oriented manufacturing system" paradigms have been presented in recent years as the basis for making such systems a reality. This paper reports on the design and realization of an agent-based intelligent control system for industrial manufacturing systems, which covers both conventional mechatronics equipment and embedded control agents. The agent-based control software components are implemented as Windows NT services and logic control programs and interfaced via distributed component object model (DCOM) and Ethernet. Results of the application in an industrial manufacturing environment are used to show the effectiveness of the proposed "Holonic" approach.
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Colombo et al. (2006) studied this question.
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