REALIZING INTEGRATED INTELLIGENT MANUFACTURING SYSTEM WITH DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENT AGENTS

The advances in information, telecommunications, and computing technologies enable us to investigate newer manufacturing paradigms to design, develop, and produce qualitative products faster, and cheaper. In this paper, we explore a new manufacturing paradigm called Integrated Intelligent Manufacturing System (IIMS) where manufacturing resources (databases, graphics programs, multimedia systems, etc.) are integrated with the manufacturing applications (CAD, CAM, etc.). The integrating infrastructure in IIMS is not necessarily within an enterpriseit may be inter-enterprise, connecting collaborating enterprises, spreading over different networks and platforms. Integration of resources with manufacturing applications is realized with intelligent interfaces. We propose modularobject oriented platform independent, mobile intelligent agents, called Distributed Intelligent Agents (DIA), as interfaces for realizing integrating infrastructure of IIMS. In this paper, we present a framework for designing an IIMS based on DIA. We show how the framework enables us to design the components of the integrating infrastructure. We then show how to develop an IIMS, by presenting a prototype. Problems in the design of IIMS and ways to tackle these difficulties are also discussed.