Agent-based smart objects management system for real-time ubiquitous manufacturing

In ubiquitous manufacturing (UM) environment, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology enables real-time traceability, visibility and interoperability in improving the performance of shop-floor planning, execution and control. This paper presents an innovative gateway technology. A gateway is physically composed of smart objects that are logically related to each other according to a shop-floor workflow configuration. Although smart objects are equipped with heterogeneous RFID devices, they are converted into standard web services using the concept of agents. The resulted agent-based smart objects (ASOs) are then centrally managed through a specially purposed smart objects Universal Description, Discovery and Integration registry (SO-UDDI) where facilities such as register, publish, find, bind and invoke are provided for ASOs. Through these facilities, smart objects can be deployed at a gateway in a "Plug and Play" fashion. Real-time data are collected by smart objects from the shop floor and processed by the corresponding gateway for further application in enterprise information systems (EISs). The proposed framework is demonstrated through a smart forklift gateway around which smart objects are deployed.