An intelligent information system for an automated, integrated manufacturing system

Abstract

Abstract The recent years of manufacturing research have been governed by the trend toward integration of automation islands into large computerized systems and the increasing application of artificial intelligence. For the information management of these manufacturing environments, this means increasing amounts of data to manage, higher complexity of operations on these data, higher number of requests and a need for significantly higher reliability and availability. The presented model for an active and highly efficient information system targets the problems that arise from these trends. A distributed system of cooperating, consistent, knowledge base sites is proposed that uses a semi-intelligent mechanism to predict the user processes in timing and data needs, to plan and schedule the operation of the site and to prepare the data before the retrieval request arrives. The prepared information is stored in object frames, ready for quick access by the user. The test runs of a prototype software exhibit the feasibility of the proposed model and show the potential for high efficiency, reliability, availability and correct performance.