Agent-based Manufacturing Systems Integration

Manufacturing systems will need to satisfy the following fundamental requirements raised by Internet Economy: enterprise integration, distributed organization, heterogeneous environments, interoperability, open and dynamic structure, cooperation, integration of humans with software and hardware, agility, scalability as well as fault tolerance. To compete effectively in today's market, enterprise must integrate the distributed heterogeneous application systems, and integrate the activities of desiging, menufacturing and scheduling with those of its partners, customers and suppliers within a supply chain. Manufacturing System Integration aims to improve the performance of T.Q.C.S.E (Time, Quality, Cost, Service, and Environment) of the product through a better efficiency of interaction and feedback of information, collaboration among application systems and entities, and cooperation of resources in manufacturing process. Based on the analysis of this requirement of manufacturing integration, this thesis identifies and discusses the problem of application integration, enterprise application, supply chain integration as well as manufacturing resource integration, and proposes a common architecture of manufacturing integration based on multi-agent system for an answer to these problems. The main research work and contributions of this paper are as follows:1. A common architecture and framework of manufacturing system integration based on multi-agent system was proposed. MAS proved to be an effective way to develop distributed application systems. Manufacturing system integration based on internet/intranet is a highly open and complex environment, and technology of negotiation and cooperation is definitely required. The abstraction of the components of manufacturing system to autonomous agent provides a national way for manufacturing system integration, and the domain independent mechanism of communication, cooperation and coordination makes MAS a potential infrastructure for the common framwork.2. The problem, methods and technology are studied for application integration, enterprise integration and supply chain integration, and an agent based model was presented for each domain area, which is actually the instances of the common architecture in different abstraction level.3. An agent based approach for manufacturing resource integration was proposed. The manufacturing resource was encapsulated as an agent which is a service provider and is reactive to the request massage translated in the form of ACL. The ability of communication and cooperation helps the collaboration of the agents among the network, solving the problem beyond each single agent andconstructing an integrated environment for application service.4. The enabling technologies for agent based manufacturing system integration are studied, such as the structure and software component of agent and agent wrapper, the methods of representation, translation and integration of product date, the interaction protocol of agents, and the process of scheduling and negotiation, among others.5. Two examples were developed based on a particular agent framework, proving the feasibility of the proposed model.