A Reconfigurable Method for Intelligent Manufacturing Based on Industrial Cloud and Edge Intelligence

The development of Industry 4.0 has provided the possibility to meet frequent changes in product type and batches, a sharp decline in the delivery cycle, constraints of quality cost, and other relevant parameters of customized production mode. Intelligent manufacturing, as a core of Industry 4.0, represents a deep integration of new IT technologies, such as the industrial Internet of Things and service-oriented architecture, and manufacturing process. To realize intelligent manufacturing, this article introduces a cloud-assisted and edge-decision-making manufacturing architecture that contains a cloud and production edges. An intelligent production edge is designed to provide the traditional devices the abilities of data access and self-decision making. Besides, the proposed architecture is modeled as a multiagent system with the edge intelligence support, describing the agent-based reconfiguration mechanism from the three aspects, namely, agent interaction, agent behavior, and negotiation mechanism. The experimental results show that the reconfigurable method based on the proposed architecture can be used in the mixed-flow production scenario based on random orders, to improve the adaptability and robustness.