Multi-Agent Management of Manufacturing Plants: Autonomy Versus Efficiency (Invited paper)

Present evolution of manufacturing systems is characterized by a progressive increase of the importance of knowledge-driven work in industrial plants of very large dimension. As the system complexity and the intelligent agents number grow, the system response uncertainty seems to grow also: this suggests to have greater attention to the agents intelligence. This paper first aims to verify if the increasing complexity of actual work systems is going to allow a greater and greater autonomy to individual agents. Then, taking into account that final scope of an enterprise is profit, a positive relation between global system efficiency and local agents autonomy is proved.