Application of Multi-agent in Intelligent Manufacturing System

Computer aided process planning (CAPP) plays an important role in the computer integrated manufacturing system (CIMS). In recent years, the competition among manufacturers to reduce the development time of new products has been quite fierce. At the same time, customerspsila needs have become relatively diverse. Considering these facts, it is essential for manufacturers to build an assembly line in the shortest time possible. Because an assembly line for varied and complex products involves numerous workstations, assembly operations and resources, it is extremely difficult for assembly process planners to develop an efficient assembly sequence and position. Multi-agent technology has been considered as a efficient approach for developing process planning systems and optimizing process plans in a distributed environment. Thus, in order to overcome such complications, a new intelligent agent CAPP system is proposed in this paper. The multi-agent based system framework, in which various intelligent agents worked together to perform process planning in an autonomous and collaborative way, was put forward. The complex problem is divided into a few small sub problems, and each agent has own knowledge and reasoning. The system consisted of nine categories of agents and functional definition of each intelligent agent was presented. The system modeling, agent structure design and coordination mechanism are proposed.