Agent-based Smart Gateway for RFID-enabled real-time wireless manufacturing

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology enables real-time traceability, visibility and interoperability of manufacturing resources and thus improves the performance of shop-floor planning, execution and control. However, a big challenge faced by manufacturers now is to deal with various RFID/Auto-ID technologies which are necessary in different production situations yet entailing different development technologies. This paper presents an innovative all-in-one Smart Gateway technology for capturing real-time production data from various manufacturing resources attached to different types of RFID/Auto-ID devices. Each of such manufacturing resources forms a smart object (SO) while agent concept is introduced for encapsulating the heterogeneous SOs. Taking advantages of web services, agents are developed and managed in a standard way following service-oriented architecture (SOA). Smart objects and agents are dynamically deployed and reconfigured at a Smart Gateway in a 'plug and play' fashion. The joint work among smart objects is governed by an agent-based workflow management (AWFM) mechanism. The proposed framework and core technologies are demonstrated by an assembly workstation case where a Smart Gateway is deployed for defining, configuring and executing assembly operations on a real-time basis.