An Agent-Based Distributed Manufacturing System

Agent theories have shown their promising capability in solving distributed complex system ever since its development. In this paper,one multi-agent based distributed product design and manufacturing planning system is presented. The objective of the research is to develop a distributed collaborative design environment for supporting cooperation among the existing engineering functions. In the system,the functional agents for design,manufacturability evaluation,process planning and scheduling are efficiently integrated with a facilitator agent. This paper firstly gives an introduction to the system structure,and the definitions for each executive agent are then described and a prototype of the proposed is also included at the end part.