A deployment of an ontology-based reconfiguration agent for intelligent mechatronic systems

This paper discusses the extension of an ontology-based reconfiguration agent that uses ontological knowledge of the manufacturing environment for the purpose of reconfiguration without human intervention. The current mass customization era requires increased flexibility and agility in the manufacturing systems to adapt changes in manufacturing requirements and environments. Our configuration agent minimises the overheads of the current reconfiguration process by automating it. It infers facts about the manufacturing environment from the ontological knowledge model and then decides whether the current environment can support the given manufacturing requirements. This paper proposes an extension of the agent architecture enabling the integration between the high level planning with the distributed low level control compliant with the upcoming IEC 61499 function blocks standard.