A generic agent mediator has been developed to coordinate heterogeneous intelligent agents in a distributed manufacturing system. Coordination takes place both between dynamically created virtual clusters of agents and within these so-called coordination clusters. Task plans are decomposed successively into subtasks which are allocated down through the agent clusters and coordinated through these. The mediator's structure and activities are illustrated through application to an intelligent manufacturing scheduling problem. The system components, including all machines and parts, are implemented as intelligent agents. This approach is being further developed to manage a concurrent engineering environment in an intelligent manufacturing system.
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