A sales agent for part manufacturers: VMSA

The sales activity of most parts manufacturing companies is based on orders of buyers, The process of promotion, receipt and selection of orders of th e parts manufacturers is closely coupled with the load status of the produc tion lines. On deciding whether to accept an order or not, as well as negot iating with buyers, sales persons need information such as load and schedul e of production lines, and manufacturability of the order. Manufacturabilit y analysis, process planning, and scheduling are therefore key features in developing an agent of sales activity for the parts manufacturing business. In this paper, an intelligent agent, a virtual manufacturing-based sales a gent (VMSA) with multi-agent architecture is proposed to support the sales activity for the parts manufacturers in the Internet environment. A VMSA ha s an integrated architecture of agent and virtual manufacturing. The protot ype of VMSA has been developed for a machine parts manufacturing company th at has lathe machines, drilling machines, cutting machines, and milling mac hines. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.