Department of Industrial Engineering Chung-Yuan Christian University
The increasing complexity of manufacturing systems imposes significant problems regarding to the design and implementation for those systems. Agent-based manufacturing system is one of the potential solutions. Many issues of agent-based manufacturing systems (ABMS) are still open to the researchers. This paper presents a two-stage approach for the modeling of ABMS. At the first stage, an object-oriented method with distributed computing technique is applied to construct agent primitives of ABMS; whereas in the second stage system architecture, execution procedure, and distributed computing platform of ABMS are presented. A closed loop, agent-based manufacturing system centered by a material handling equipment for multi-operation jobs is implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.
Keywords: intelligent agent, manufacturing control, object-oriented methodology, distributed computing
Cite this article as: Kung-Jeng Wang and Chung-How Chou, "Modeling of Agent-Based Manufacturing Systems," Journal of the Chinese Institute of Industrial Engineers, 18, 1-14 (2001).