A JAVA BASED COMMUNICATION ARCHITECTURE FOR AGILE MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS

The concept of agile manufacturing is characterized by the need to respond quickly to the changing customer requirements and technical innovations. The communication and control architecture of an agile manufacturing plant are particularly difficult to develop. The main problem is concerned with implementing the same software on different platforms and operating systems, and the issues of porting it to new platforms when novel hardware becomes available. Java, a programming language developed by Sun Microsystems, which represents a new candidate for a robust, architecture independent programming language, could be an answer to these problems. This paper describes the implementation of the communication and control architecture, completely written in Java, for an agile manufacturing workcell for the footwear industry.