An Architecture for Decision Making in the Factory of the Future

A major manufacturing research facility is being established at the National Bureau of Standards. The Automated Manufacturing Research Facility has been designed to address the need for standards and measurement for the factory of the future. A five-layer hierarchical control architecture is under development to control the various production and support activities needed to drive that factory. The proper execution of many of these activities requires the solution of one or more optimization problems. We propose a decision-making hierarchy that parallels that control architecture, describe the problems that exist at each level within that hierarchy, and discuss the work underway at NBS to address some of those problems.