Production Automation and Control (PAC) represents the foremen of the factory of the future, responsible for overseeing the machines and for communicating between machines and management. This includes self-adaptive control, flexible/reconfigurable manufacturing, adaptive quality systems, agent-based distributed architectures, (machine) knowledge management, and human-machine interaction. The major research issue identified for this cluster is collaborative agent-based (or holonic) manufacturing automation, and related to that, collaborative automation, self-adaptive control and human-machine interaction. There is considerable interaction between this cluster and the Advanced Production Machines cluster in making these machines more ‘intelligent’ and between this cluster and the Production Organisation and Management cluster in controlling these machines within the overall Autonomous Factory environment. It is the combination of these cluster areas that will ultimately provide the overall flexible/reconfigurable Autonomous Factory.

• Collaborative Agent-based manufacturing Automation will provide the necessary collaboration of advanced production machines within the factory. Agent-based, or ‘agent-wrapped’, machines require two properties, namely, autonomy, that is, independent knowledge-based action, and communication, between collaborating agents and between these agents and the general framework in which they act. This framework should, importantly, either be synonymous with the enterprise/manufacturing model or else tightly integrated to it.
• Self-adaptive control is related to agent autonomy, but may be more closely distinguished as 'autonomicity’, that is, self-regulating/managing.It includes both self-adaptation of the machine control function as well as self-adaptation of machine supervision (e.g. self-service and self-tuning of machine components, fault tolerant robots and automatic machinery, autonomous and intelligent monitoring and diagnosis devices).
• Human-machine interaction allows human ‘agents’ effectively to integrate and interact with agent wrapped production machines, including advanced multimodal/multimedia and intelligent user-friendly interfaces for production machines.