Workflow and agent based platform for collaborative manufacturing across enterprises

This paper presented an agent and workflow based a cross enterprise collaborative manufacturing platform, in which a set of intelligent agents cooperated to perform manufacturing jobs and process modeling, dynamic task scheduling and dispatching, resource management as well as manufacturing process management on the basis of a shared domain ontology. Key issues such as system architecture, knowledge based job modeling and scheduling, resource brokering, task allocation and agent interactions were discussed and a prototype implemented based on JADE agent framework and Jess Rule engine were proposed. The manufacturing process of an aircraft engine which spans across multiple enterprises was used to prove the concept and system. With the attribute of modulation, flexibility, and openness, the platform can be further applied to support Outsourced Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management.