An agent-based interaction-oriented shop floor to support emergent diagnosis

The emerging production paradigms, potentiated by the advances in Information Technologies (IT), especially in web related standards and technologies as well as the progressive acceptance of the multiagent systems (MAS) concept and related technologies, envision collections of modules whose individual and collective function adapts and evolves ensuring the fitness and adequacy of the shop floor in tackling profitable but volatile business opportunities. Despite the richness of the interactions and the effort set in modeling them, their potential to favor fault propagation and interference, in these complex environments, has been ignored from a diagnostic point of view. To avoid corrupting the distributed nature of the system any diagnostic method/tool should necessarily adapt and evolve. This implies that the diagnostic model should emerge in system rather than being imposed. In the present paper the authors contend that there is added value in further considering interactions and modeling the network effect of interactions for the purpose of diagnosing the system. In this context, an agent-based architecture is proposed to support an emergent diagnostic model.