Coordination and monitoring in an intelligent global manufacturing service system

Recent years have seen significant changes made in terms of enterprise strategy and manufacturing paradigms particularly for companies working together to remain world competitive in the volatile market. As the development of manufacturing is becoming less and less limited by national borders, a number of global manufacturing (GM) networks have been established, taking advantage of the quickly evolving computer networking and information technologies. Study indicates that while a number of frameworks related to global systems have been described in contemporary publications, the detailed structure and formulation of the central-monitoring mechanism of such a partnership system has not received as much attention as it deserves, This paper presents the framework of a GM service network that is characterized by its coordinating as well as monitoring capabilities. The main feature of the presented system is its rule-based reasoning capability to convert a job request from clients into basic tasks which are to be carried out by a group of virtual agents (VAs) equipped with various defined capabilities. This paper also presents a prototype program that has been developed and tested in an emulated GM environment, thereby validating the application of agent-based systems in enterprise networks. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.