A Federated Cooperation Architecture for Expert Systems Involved in Layout Optimization

In shoe and handbag industry, there are many CIM activities that can at best be represented by expert systems. One example of such an activity is the optimization system that supports the cutting of regular/irregular shapes out of uniform/non-uniform base leather material. This paper focuses on and describes a layout optimization environment with five different kinds of agents, where every agent is an intelligent expert system. In order to perform the necessary tasks in the layout optimization activity, the involved agents need to cooperate, and share and exchange their information both with each other and with other agents involved in other CIM activities. In general, an agent representing a CIM subactivity can be represented either by an intelligent system, a simple file system, or an information management system. A natural architecture to represent such agents’ cooperation and information sharing is a federated/distributed network of interrelated agents. In this paper we first address and describe the peer federated architecture and then present a peer implementation of the agents involved in the layout optimization system and the architecture to support their cooperation.