An adaptive and upgradable agent-based system for coordinated product development and manufacture

Abstract Last decade witnessed the growth of globally decentralized product development and manufacture. The complexity of products created in such a distributed environment often requires close collaborations among a number of design and production partners. In this paper, an agent-based system for coordinated product development and manufacture is presented. The system consists of two categories of agents. The first category consists solely of a managing agent (MA) and the second consists of many functional agents such as the manufacturability evaluation agent, resource agent, process-planning agent, scheduling agent, etc. Each agent represents a domain expert and it can be installed in an individual computer. All the agents could be dispersed in geographically different regions and communicate with one another through the Internet. With each functional agent having specific functionality, the MA is the center of the intelligent system. It assists the work of other agents and enables them to collaborate closely with one another. With such a system in place, a product life cycle can be optimized from product design to final manufacturing as all the procedures are considered comprehensively and integrally, and each procedure is performed in a way as to ease and expedite the work of other agents. An agent language, which includes many specifically defined performatives, is defined. Each agent can perform its task intelligently by interpreting the commands (performatives) from other agents. Moreover, with the consideration of possible future methodology changes, the internal structure of each functional agent is modularized into several components. Such an architecture ensures that the system is flexible, adaptive and upgradable.