Study And Realization Of Equipment Agent In The Multi-Agent Based Agile Manufacturing Scheduling System

Intelligent Agent technology is usually considered as one of the most promising approaches to building the agile manufacturing scheduling system in an open distributed manufacturing environment. Equipment Agent, as the representative of equipment which is one of the most essential elements in a manufacturing system, plays a very important role in the multi-Agent based agile manufacturing system scheduling. This thesis, therefore, focuses on the research of how to build an equipment Agent with a proper structure and all-around functions. Before an equipment Agent can bid for a new job, it should be aware of the manufacturing ability of the equipment, without which the equipment Agent cannot present the bid messages intelligently. Therefore, an appropriate way should be found for the definition and representation of the manufacturing ability of equipment in a Multi-Agent based agile manufacturing environment. Based on the research of knowledge representation of equipment Agent, equipment Agent's reasoning and decision-making model has been discussed. Communication language and interaction protocols of equipment Agent are introduced for the negotiating and cooperating with other Agents. A scheduling ontology according to the agile manufacturing scheduling system is built by protégé 2000 in order to avoid the confusion in Agent communications. Based on the analysis of Agent-oriented modeling methodologies, equipment Agent is modeled by AUML, which is the most popular Agent-oriented modeling methodology, and recommended by both FIPA and OMG. By extending UML's class diagram, the states, the attributes and the operations of equipment Agent are described. AUML protocol diagram and statechart diagram are also employed here to show the details of the external interaction and the internal behaviors of equipment Agent, respectively. At last, a simple multi-Agent based agile manufacturing scheduling system is developed with JADE and Java, and an example is also presented to demonstrate what is mainly discussed about the equipment Agent in this thesis.