A service- and multi-agent-oriented manufacturing automation architecture: An IEC 62264 level 2 compliant implementation

This paper describes an approach for developing and implementing a service- and multi-agent-oriented manufacturing automation architecture, being particularly focused on functional features of the IEC 62264 L2 standard. The proposed SoA architecture facilitates managing and controlling networked smart automation components in a distributed manufacturing environment. The services, generated and exposed by automation components located on the levels 1 and 2 of the ISA’95-compliant enterprise architecture, are essential part of an “Automation Service Cloud”, which is the result of the virtualization of the physical production environment. Moreover, these services can be accessed, requested and used by other components of these and upper levels, i.e., MES (Manufacturing Executing System) distributed components like a collaborative multi-agent-based manufacturing scheduling and dispatching system. Using the main characteristics of the service-orientation, the automation services can be composed and orchestrated in the cloud, creating emergent behaviors, which is a direct result of the virtualization, i.e., transforming the mechatronics/production layout into an automatically collaborative network.