Agent-Based Decentralized Manufacturing Execution System via Employment Network Collaboration

High variability in multi-product manufacturing environments and rapidly changing customer demands make decentralized coordination of work-in-process (WIP) and production resources increasingly important. However, the intrinsic rigidity of conventional centralized and monolithic manufacturing execution systems (MESs) renders them unsuitable for such highly dynamic environments. To address this limitation, this study proposes an agent-based distributed, decentralized MES architecture. The manufacturing execution process is realized through collaboration among constituent agents based on an employment network (EmNet). Specifically, three types of agents are introduced: WIPAgents (representing WIPs), PAgents (representing processing resources), and MHAgents (representing material-handling resources). Collaboration among agents (e.g., collaborator discovery, partner selection, and data sharing/exchange) is facilitated by a data-space-based collaboration platform which was introduced in our prior work. To validate the proposed architecture, we built a digital-twin-based simulation testbed and conducted simulation experiments. The experimental results confirm the validity and operational feasibility of the proposed architecture.