Improving manufacturing co-operation in a virtual enterprise by tracker mobile agents

Agents are a new paradigm in software development. However, this paradigm offers new methodologies only in certain areas. Our view is that IT integration of a virtual enterprise is one of the most promising fields for agent-based software. In this paper, we present an approach based on tracker mobile agents, which is intended to support the decision-making process for changes during product manufacturing in a virtual enterprise. We argue that a possible approach is to use rule-based heuristic reasoning, augmented with human interaction.