Multi-agent based modeling of manufacturing network

An intelligent manufacturing system is modeled currently from the viewpoint of manufacturing applications, and the network platform's influence to manufacturing applications is not considered adequately. However any bottleneck in service oriented architecture (SOA) for the manufacturing network can affect the agility of the IT environment. In this paper, to achieve a trade-off between manufacturing resources and network resources, the manufacturing network is modeled with multi-agent, in which two kinds of basic elements, the manufacturing application unit and the network carrier of manufacturing information, are presented. And their main characters are described by colored petri net. The manufacturing application model drives the network platform that inversely provides this application model technology supports. The proposed multi-agent system is demonstrated through an example integration scenario involving production plan, resources management and execution subsystems. And the result suggests that analyzing and designing the system architecture of networked manufacturing should give due attention to the operation system as well as manufacturing applications.