Development of an intelligent task management system in a manufacturing information network

Recent research related to agent-based systems has seen significant advances made in terms of the 'intelligence' level of collaborative and autonomous features of agents with a number of proposed frameworks reported in contemporary publications. However, the automatic decomposition of job requests into basic tasks to be carried out by relevant agents, which enhances the 'intelligence' level of the system, has not received as much attention as it deserves. This article presents an Intelligent Task Management System (ITMS) which can usefully be deployed in a manufacturing information network. It comprises a rule-based inference mechanism responsible for the division of a client's job request into basic tasks and an Object-Oriented Virtual Agent (OOVA) module created using object-oriented technology for achieving automatic task decomposition and assignment. The prototype program of this ITMS has been developed and then tested in an emulated manufacturing environment, using CLIPS as the tool for building the rule-based program and Visual Basic 5 for constructing the OOVA module. It is expected that the experience of developing and implementing the ITMS may be useful for the design of the next generation of collaborative agent-based systems to be adopted in a manufacturing information network. In this article, details related to the structure, design and implementation of the ITMS are covered with actual program codes included. Further, a methodology for the design of the Rule-based Inference Mechanism (RIM) is also presented. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.