Multi-agent modeling of dispersed manufacturing networks

Multi-agent modeling has emerged as a promising discipline for dealing with decision-making processes in distributed information system applications. One such application is the modeling of distributed manufacturing networks which can link up various manufacturing firms to form a "virtual'' manufact uring consortium on a global basis. This paper presents a multi-agent model that can be deployed in a dispersed manufacturing network involving compan ies with different core competence. The multi-agent model plays the importa nt role of monitoring the information flow and task allocation among the ne twork companies by means of intelligent agents, which are software programs designed to accomplish specific tasks like ''real'' human agents with spec ialized skills. This proposed model is equipped with various computational intelligence technologies for various purposes, including rule-based reason ing for decomposing jobs into fundamental tasks and object-oriented technol ogy for the design and creation of the intelligent agents, together with a genetic algorithm scheme to optimize the sequence of tasks to be carried ou t by various agents in order to achieve minimum overhead incurred during th e operations across the dispersed network. In this paper, the detailed infr astructure of a multi-agent model and how it can be deployed to enhance the performance of a dispersed manufacturing network are presented. (C) 1999 E lsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.