A Human Centered Multi-Agent-System for Production Planning and Control

In consequence of Industrie 4.0, the application of new information and communication technologies is increasing. A central problem of industrial enterprises is the lack of any IT system which would provide required exercises concerning production planning and control (PPC). Therefore, several software systems are applied in manufacturing. Thus the demand arises to intelligently link the available and new IT systems in manufacturing. A multi-agent system offers a modeling concept for a planning support tool of PPC for the intelligent link of several systems and it increases the automation of planning processes. However, the disadvantage of multi-agent systems is that processes of autonomously acting agents are not comprehensible for humans. Nevertheless, in Industrie 4.0 the human shall be involved as the executive body or even as a decision maker. Therefore, this article describes an agent-based approach in which an agent system is used as an interface solution between IT systems and extended by a visualization approach in order to implement a partially autonomous support system for an agent-based PPC.