An agent-based system for shop floor control for the textile industry

Competition and increasing customer orientation lead to a higher complexity and dynamics of the production process. Information technology has to keep pace with these demanding requirements. We present in this paper the design and implementation of an agentbased approach for a shop floor control system in the textile industry (FLS-TEX). The existing system has been developed at the Fraunhofer Institute IITB for the special needs of the textile industry with its many process-like aspects. The development of this enhanced prototype serves as an evaluation platform for the use of agent technology for the chosen application and as a demonstrator for project acquisition. We compared different concepts of stationary and mobile software agents, that could be used and discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the approaches and in comparison to the present system. An important criterion was to keep the changes of the existing system and hence potential failure reasons at a minimum. The most promising variant was then implemented using a commonly available and widely used agent platform. We end with a discussion of useful extensions of this concept towards more intelli-gent applications, that may easily be integrated without changing the kernel of the system.