A versatile agile agent-based infrastructure for hybrid production environments

To meet the requirements of modern production, where short time to market, production driven by customer requirements and low cost small quantity production are important issues, we have developed an agent-based software infrastructure for agile industrial production. This production is done on special devices called equiplets. A grid of these equiplets connected by a fast network is capable of producing a variety of different products in parallel. The multi-agent-based software infrastructure is responsible for the agile manufacturing. This agent-based model also fits well in a production environment where the production is done by humans instead of equiplets. This is what we call a hybrid production environment.