Agent-based Modelling of Manufacturing Systems in the Context of "Industry 4.0"

The requirements of the modern market are manifested mainly in the need to provide a diversified assortment and personalized products. The ability to diversify the product range and adjust the production volume to the market requirements is a desirable feature of modern production systems. The Fourth Industrial Revolution has introduced many changes in the process planning domain that increased the possibility of better allocation of resources by applying artificial intelligence methods in order to achieve the effect of self-organization of the production process. The Smart Factory concept, based on cyber-physical systems, has allowed the customers to have greater influence on the process of manufacturing the ordered goods and even to change the order details during the process. The implementation of Industry 4.0 assumptions, and in particular the emergence of autonomous units, requires a new approach to modelling of manufacturing systems. This paper considers the problem of applying the agent-based modelling in modelling of such systems, focusing especially on the problem of adjusting the current formalism of agents or holons to the principles of Industry 4.0. An important part is the analysis of the agent definition in the context of manufacturing systems, in accordance with the available literature. The next step involves the discussion on the possibility of representing the Industry 4.0-compliant systems in terms of multi-agent paradigm.