XIM-SIFIP: An Expert Simulation Environment for Factory Automation

Factory automation moves toward knowledge-intensive shop organisations; computer-intelligence instruments, with combined (causal/judgmental) processing capabilities, are considered for coupling flexibility with efficiency, in order to fully exploit the versatility of the robotised plants. The development of pertinent expert-programming environments requires appropriate reference functional models of the multiagent manufacturing framework, in order to preserve the structural contexts of the industrial production surroundings. In the paper the considerations are referred to an example implementation; the architecture of the XIM-SIFIP code is related to the principal features of an expert-integrated-manager, that superintends to a robotised plant, timely enabling the efficient programmed-mode or the flexible adaptive-mode operations.