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This paper describes an agent-based software infrastructure for agile industrial production. This production is done on special devices called equiplets. A grid of these equiplets connected by a fast network is capable of producing a variety of different products in parallel. The multi-agent-based underlying systems uses two kinds of agents: an agent representing the product and an agent representing the equiplet.

To meet the requirements of modern production, where short time to market, production driven by customer requirements and low cost small quantity production are important issues, we have been developing an agent-based software infrastructure for agile industrial production. This production is done on special devices called equiplets. A grid of these equiplets connected by a fast network is capable of producing a variety of different products in parallel. The multiagent-based software infrastructure is responsible for the agile manufacturing. An important aspect of this software is the scheduling of the production. This paper describes a multiagent-based solution for this problem. In our production system requests for products arrive at random times and every product must be completed before its deadline.Keywords-multi-agent planning; agile agent-based manufacturing 2012 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology 978-0-7695-4880-7/12 $26.00