Heterogeneous Autonomous Agent Architecture for Agile Manufacturing

Considering the agent-based modeling and mapping in manufacturing system, some system models are described in this paper, which are included: Domain Based Hierarchical Structure (DBHS), Cascading Agent Structure (CAS), Proximity Relation structure (PRS), and Bus-based network structure (BNS). In DBHS, one sort of agents, called static agents, individually acts as Domain Agents, Resources Agents, UserInterface Agents and Gateway Agents. And the others, named mobile agents, are the brokers of task and process flow. Static agents representing a subsystem may itself be an agent-based network and should learn as the mobile agents to deal with new situation. Mobile agents move around the network domains taking advantage of the resources to fulfill their goals. In CAS, We use Unified Modeling Language (UML) to build up the agent-based manufacturing system It is said Enterprise agent (main agent) has factory agents together with some directly jurisdictional workshop agents, cell agents, and individual resource agents. Likewise, factory agent has workshop agents together with some directly jurisdictional cell agents and individual resource agents, and so on. In PRS, the resources agents are located together by its function and abilities. There is only one agent behaves as the task-announcer. The communication just occurs among the Proximity Relational agents. In BNS, It is very similar with the society of human being connected with a network, some agents, such as ‘cost calculating’, are just cope with the matter-of-fact job. And some agents run as the individual resources that can negotiate with each other and advertise a necessary message within the whole domain or a given group of agents. The administration just relies on the individual address of agents and the group ID code of agents.