Research & Development On Network-Based Agile Manufacturing Information System

With the globalization of ecomomy and high-speed development of information technology, the market competition has become more and more drastic. Facing the requirement of product's individuation and diversification, in order to seize hold of market opportunities, only by means of speeding up technological reform and cooperating with other enterprises initiatively, can a enterprise develop the popular product rapidly. Just in order to adapt to the requirements of the competitive environment, agile manufacturing emerges as the times require. As a realization means of agile manufacturing, dynamic ally is deemed to one of the most effective patterns of enterprise running in the 21st century. It mainly uses network technology to realize resource-share within a enterprise as well as among enterprises, and implement design and manufacture at different places, then put the product of customer satisfied into market in the shortest time.On the basis of research on the basic theory of agile manufacturing and its development at home and abroad, combining current computer technologies (such as network, database, web, corba and multi-agent), this paper puts forward network-based agile manufacturing information system, presents the whole frame and the realizaton methods of this system, and develops a prototype system. With the network technology, this system is aimed at realizing dynamic ally, resource-share and network-cooperation among enterprises, realizing agile management, agile design and agile manufacturing throughout the whole process of enterprise's production, and implementing application integration, enterprises integration and environment integration of heterogeneous mutual-cooperation. In this way, the ability of market competition of the enterprise can be enhanced greatly.In the development of prototype system, according to the practical requirement of agile manufacturing and dynamic ally, the system is divided into three parts to realize. First, the ally center is built. Second, the system of resource-share and network-cooperation among dynamic ally enterprises is developed. Third, the support tools are developed. In the establishing of ally center, the technology of ASP is used to set up a professional information share platform for enterprises. Enterprises having registered not only can find out the basic information of the interrelated enterprises and the information of market rapidly, but also can obtain technological support andissue the information of market requirement. In the development of the system of resource-share and network-cooperation among dynamic ally enterprises, combining the technology of CORBA, Multi-agent, network, and database, and utilizing the cross-platform characteristic of CORBA and the intelligent characteristic of agent, the distributed and heterogeneous enterprises can be allied dynamically, and the resource-share and network-cooperation can be realized among the allied enterprises. At the aspect of support tools' development, according to the requirement, we mainly develop the CAPP tool system under the environment of agile manufacturing. In order to meet the requirement of different enterprises and realize the customization by themselves, the design of the system is always guided with the idea of opening. The tool system not only realizes interactive, derived and instance process planning, but also provides the module of half-intelligentized process resource database management to manage process resouce data dynamically and communicate with other systems, and the concurrent design can be implemented. Consequently the efficiency of process planning and quality could be improved greatly.