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The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0), with the help of cyber-physical systems (CPS), the Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI), is transforming the way industrial setups are designed. Recent literature has provided insight about large firms gaining benefits from Industry 4.0, but many of these benefits do not translate to SMEs. The agent-oriented smart factory (AOSF) framework provides a solution to help bridge the gap between Industry 4.0 frameworks and SME-oriented setups by providing a general and high-level supply chain (SC) framework and an associated agent-oriented storage and retrieval (AOSR)-based warehouse management strategy. This paper presents the extended heuristics of the AOSR algorithm and details how it improves the performance efficiency in an SME-oriented warehouse. A detailed discussion on the thorough validation via scenario-based experimentation and test cases explain how AOSR yielded 60–148% improved performance metrics in certain key areas of a warehouse.

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The emergence of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) has sparked proliferation in thedomain of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), and extensive research has been conductedin this area since its beginning. However, recent literature claims that Smallto Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs) are not getting the benefits of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) in a full potential because of unresolved compatibility-mismatch issues and involvement of high infrastructuralcost. In order to help bridge this gap, the Extended Agent-Oriented Smart Factory (xAOSF) framework provides a high-level guideline solution, integrating the whole supply chain (SC), from supplier-end to customer-end with an objective to expose SMEs towards the benefits of I4.0. This paper, as part of a publication series, provides a conceptualised visualisation of the xAOSF framework as a customised CPS,which presents an elegant mediation mechanism between multiple xAOSF agents to uptake negotiation and coordination schemes at different enterprise levels. This paper also includes detail on howthe I4.0 based xAOSF framework caters to three-dimensional enterprise integration, in order to provide seamless connectivity and robustness in enterprise-wide operations. Furthermore, for the purpose of validation and to justify the claim, the experimentation is performed by applying a comprehensive test scenario onxAOSF's recommended AOSR WMS strategy in comparison with linear SC-based standard WMS system, which yields a substantial performance improvement in certain key-performance areas.

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