Integration of process planning and scheduling using mobile-agent based approach in a networked manufacturing environment

摘要

Effective and efficient implementation of intelligent and/or recently emerged networked manufacturingsystems require an enterprise level integration. The networked manufacturing offers several advantagesin the current competitive atmosphere by way to reduce, by shortening manufacturing cycle time andmaintaining the production flexibility thereby achieving several feasible process plans. The first step inthis direction is to integrate manufacturing functions such as process planning and scheduling formulti-jobs in a network based manufacturing system. It is difficult to determine a proper plan that meetsconflicting objectives simultaneously. This paper describes a mobile-agent based negotiation approach tointegrate manufacturing functions in a distributed manner; and its fundamental framework and functionsare presented. Moreover, ontology has been constructed by using the Protégé software which possessesthe flexibility to convert knowledge into Extensible Markup Language (XML) schema of WebOntology Language (OWL) documents. The generated XML schemas have been used to transfer informationthroughout the manufacturing network for the intelligent interoperable integration of product datamodels and manufacturing resources. To validate the feasibility of the proposed approach, an illustrativeexample along with varied production environments that includes production demand fluctuations ispresented and compared the proposed approach performance and its effectiveness with evolutionaryalgorithm based Hybrid Dynamic-DNA (HD-DNA) algorithm. The results show that the proposed schemeis very effective and reasonably acceptable for integration of manufacturing functions.