PABADIS - an agent based flexible manufacturing concept

To cope with a fast changing environment manufacturing companies need, besides the introduction of flexible and dynamic organizational structures, new production planning concepts for manufacturing plants which support "eProduction" and "mass customization" concepts. Fortunately, the increasing use of IT-technologies in distributed and de-centralized systems in industrial automation supports the required reconfigurability and flexibility of modern production systems. Against this background PABADIS, a flexible and dynamic architecture for plant automation and especially job scheduling based upon the use of agent technologies, is described. In PABADIS the MES layer is dissolved and its functionality divided into a centralized part that can be attached to an ERP system and a decentralized part, implemented by mobile software agents, that can be connected to the production equipment.