Manufacturing Entities with Incomplete Information

In the 80’s, Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) concept was adopted as a solution to all the problems in manufacturing. However, it was soon realized that the evolving demands for manufacturing systems were not handled by CIM. New alternatives rise, and especially Agent-Based Manufacturing and Holonic Manufacturing Systems, for cooping with today’s manufacturing systems requirements. From an informational point of view (i.e., its database), manufacturing systems are very complex. Thus, a special attention is given to the representation and handling of incomplete information. From a developer’s point of view, the ability to reuse code (i.e., functionality) across several entities greatly reduces developing efforts. Thus, inheritance of behaviors is proposed as a way to achieve code reuse. This paper presents a framework for the development of intelligent manufacturing systems, which allows the modeling of incomplete information and inheritance into each agent/holon. A prototype for an already described system for dynamic scheduling of manufacturing orders is also presented.