A CORBA-based agent-driven design for distributed intelligent manufacturing systems

An agent-oriented methodology is presented for representation, acquisition, and processing of manufacturing knowledge along with analysis and modeling of an intelligent manufacturing system (IMS). An intelligent manufacturing system adopts heterarchical and collaborative control as its information s ystem architecture. The behavior of the entire manufacturing system is coll aboratively determined by many interacting subsystems that may have their o wn independent interests, values, and modes of operation. The subsystems ar e represented as agents. An agent's architecture and task decomposition met hod are presented. The agent-oriented methodology is used to analyze and mo del an intelligent machine cell. An intelligent machine center is considere d as an autonomous, modular, reconfigurable and fault-tolerant machine tool with self-perception, decision making, and self-process planning, able to cooperate with other machines through communication. The common object requ est broker architecture (CORBA) distributed software control system was dev eloped as a simple prototype. A case study illustrates an intelligent machi ne center.