AN OBJECT-ORIENTED KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION FOR INTELLIGENT CONTROL OF MANUFACTURING WORKSTATIONS

In this paper, we present the concepts behind the implementation of be havioral and cognitive capabilities in objects used for controlling wo rkstations in manufacturing systems. These capabilities characterize a new class of objects called agents; such objects intuitively play the role of human decision-makers in the system modeled. Three types of r easoning activities are considered: a meta-reasoning level to control the inference/search reasoning activities, the local reasoning level i ncorporating simple rule-based procedures and an extended reasoning le vel representing the reasoning activities that cannot be performed usi ng simple procedures and thus require external knowledge agents to ass ist the decision-making process. Implementation issues are discussed, illustrated by an application of the approach to the modeling of works tations in a rolling-mill facility.