Development of an agent-based Virtual CIM architecture for small to medium manufacturers

Today's global competitions are forcing enterprises to rely on integrated manufacturing systems to satisfy constantly changing market requirements. Whereas Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) often feel difficult to compete with large organisations due to having insufficient resources. By integrating resources of many partners, the SMEs can form global integrated manufacturing systems in the form of Virtual CIM (VCIM) and thus achieve a competitive edge. VCIM is a concept towards integrating globally distributed manufacturing resources across enterprise boundaries. In order to implement VCIM, this research project develops an agent-based architecture to support the integration and scheduling of distributed manufacturing resources. This architecture accommodates all agents for VCIM with a three-layered structure and permits new agents to be connected with the existing structure through the Internet when and where necessary. In this architecture, many Facilitator agents coordinate activities of manufacturing resources in a parallel manner. Meanwhile, the Facilitator agents achieve proposal messages through agent negotiation based on distributed resources' real time information and use a backward network algorithm for shortest-path to perform optimisation for resource allocation. With these approaches, an optimised production schedule has the lowest cost as the primary criteria and the shortest production time as the secondary criteria while satisfying customer required due date/time and delivering destination. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.