Distributed Management, Monitoring and Control of Manufacturing Shop Floors

This paper presents some results of our research on distributed management, monitoring and control of manufacturing shop floors using the Internet, Web and agent technologies. Two new concepts are proposed and developed: iShopFloor on the application of Distributed Artificial Intelligence to the shop floor for distributed intelligent manufacturing process planning, scheduling, sensing and control; eShopFloor on the development of a Web based collaborative environment for remote monitoring, control, diagnostics and maintenance of manufacturing devices (e.g., machines, robots) in the shop floor. Prototype implementation details are presented and key implementation issues are discussed.Copyright © 2003 by ASME