The emerging paradigm of agent-based computation has revolutionized the building of intelligent and decentralized systems. The new technologies met well the requirements in all domains of manufacturing where problems of uncertainty and temporal dynamics, information sharing and distributed operation, or coordination and cooperation of autonomous entities had to be tackled. In the paper software agents and multi-agent systems are introduced and through a comprehensive survey, their potential manufacturing applications are outlined. Special emphasis is laid on methodological issues and deployed industrial systems. After discussing open issues and strategic research directions, we conclude that the evolution of agent technologies and manufacturing will probably proceed hand in hand. The former can receive real challenges from the latter, which, in turn, will have more and more benefits in applying agent technologies, presumably together with well-established or emerging approaches of other disciplines.

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In human-robot collaborative assembly, robots are often required to dynamically change their pre-planned tasks to collaborate with human operators in a shared workspace. However, the robots used today are controlled by pre-generated rigid codes that cannot support effective human-robot collaboration. In response to this need, multi-modal yet symbiotic communication and control methods have been a focus in recent years. These methods include voice processing, gesture recognition, haptic interaction, and brainwave perception. Deep learning is used for classification, recognition and context awareness identification. Within this context, this keynote provides an overview of symbiotic human-robot collaborative assembly and highlights future research directions.

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The production industry is moving towards the next generation of assembly, which is conducted based on safe and reliable robots working in the same workplace alongside with humans. Focusing on assembly tasks, this paper presents a review of human-robot collaboration research and its classification works. Aside from defining key terms and relations, the paper also proposes means of describing human-robot collaboration that can be relied on during detailed elaboration of solutions. A human-robot collaborative assembly system is developed with a novel and comprehensive structure, and a case study is presented to validate the proposed framework.Assembly, man-machine system, human-robot collaboration

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The modern manufacturing industry calls for a new generation of integration models that are more interoperable, intelligent, adaptable and distributed. Evolved from service-oriented architecture, web-based manufacturing and cloud computing, cloud manufacturing is considered worldwide a new enabling technology for manufacturing enterprises to respond quickly and effectively to the changing global market. For Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) in particular, it is a critical necessity to recycle, reuse and remanufacture WEEE products by setting up a cloud-based information system. In this paper, a novel service-oriented remanufacturing platform is proposed based on the cloud manufacturing concept.