An Agent Based Monitoring Architecture for Plug and Produce Based Manufacturing Systems

In recent years a set of production paradigms were proposed in order to allow companies the possibility to face the new market requirements and needs, such as the new demand for highly customized products and the decrease of product's life cycle. These new paradigms propose solutions capable of facing these requirements, giving manufacturing systems high capacity to adapt along with high flexibility and intelligence in order to deal with disturbances, like unexpected orders or malfunctions. Evolvable Production Systems propose a solution based on the usage of modularity and self-organization to support pluggability and in this way allow the companies to add and / or remove components during execution without any programming effort and without wasting much valued time. Although these new systems give companies the capacity to be more flexible, they were not designed to perform monitoring as flexible as the control system itself, because the usual monitoring software, mostly based on SCADA systems, is not capable of re-adapting during execution to this new plugging and / or unplugging of devices and to changes in the characteristics of the entire system's topology. Considering these aspects, this article proposes a fully distributed agent based architecture, capable of performing monitoring at different levels while still supporting the addition and removal of monitoring entities, responsible for data extraction and analysis during runtime.