A hierarchical structure of cyber-physical production systems based on heterogeneous multi-agent systems

In the context of Industry 4.0, cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) are fast becoming the critical instrument in the intelligent manufacturing. In reality, there are various heterogeneous objects in the CPPS, including sensors or devices in the physical environment and algorithmic modules in the network space. The findings of this research provide insights for designing the hierarchical structure of CPPS. The CPPS, which are divided into the physical resources layer, the smart connection layer, the local deployment layer and the cloud-Platform as a Service (cloud-PaaS) layer, can be abstracted into the heterogeneous multi-agent systems (MAS) with the directed topologies, and agents with different functions represent for the corresponding objects in the CPPS. Its strength is in information exchange among different objects in the CPPS via Data Engine (DE) agents. In addition, the communication topology of the CPPS is described as the directed graph. A case study for an unmanned factory is conducted to show the feasibility of the method suggested in this paper. The proposed method could be able to act as a significant valuable reference for dealing with the problem of collaborative control in the CPPS.