Multi-agent modeling of dispersed manufacturing networks

Multi-agent modeling has emerged as a promising discipline for dealing with decision-making processes in distributed information system applications. One such application is the modeling of distributed manufacturing networks which can link up various manufacturing firms to form a "virtual'' manufacturing consortium on a global basis. This paper presents a multi-agent model that can be deployed in a dispersed manufacturing network involving companies with different core competence. The multi-agent model plays the important role of monitoring the information flow and task allocation among the network companies by means of intelligent agents, which are software programs designed to accomplish specific tasks like ''real'' human agents with specialized skills. This proposed model is equipped with various computational intelligence technologies for various purposes, including rule-based reasoning for decomposing jobs into fundamental tasks and object-oriented technology for the design and creation of the intelligent agents, together with a genetic algorithm scheme to optimize the sequence of tasks to be carried out by various agents in order to achieve minimum overhead incurred during the operations across the dispersed network. In this paper, the detailed infrastructure of a multi-agent model and how it can be deployed to enhance the performance of a dispersed manufacturing network are presented. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.