Abstract
This chapter takes a look at the recent developments in the area of manufacturing systems control that are focused on the goal of achieving rapid and adaptive response to change in the manufacturing environment. A primary concern of recent research in this area has been the choice of architecture, which determines how the decision-making agents in a control system should be organized to effectively achieve overall manufacturing system objectives. To achieve the reconfigurability and adaptability required of agile manufacturing systems, the control system cannot be limited to a single static structure. Experimental results have indicated that control architectures that are hybrids of heterarchical and hierarchical control architectures offer reconfigurability as well as better manufacturing system performance than either extreme of the control architecture spectrum. Similarly, recent work in the area of multi-agent systems and holonic manufacturing systems also point in the direction of hybrid architectures that provide the benefits of centralized elements and functionality while maintaining the robustness and agility of heterarchical architectures.
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