A Discrete part oriented collaborative manufacturing service platform based on agent and grid

Collaborative manufacturing is gaining more and more popularity in the dynamic and global market environment, as raises the requirement of a platform to support the remote resource utilization and distributed process integration for the operation and management of collaborative manufacturing. This paper combines agent and grid workflow technology to construct an integrated application service platform for collaborative manufacturing of discrete part. The grid service is used to encapsulate technological resources to be accessible remotely, while the agent technology is integrated with grid service to encapsulate resources such as machine tools which require local human operation. Grid workflow is applied to model and enact the overall manufacturing process and invoke appropriate grid services dynamically so that manufacturing tasks can be executed in a controlled and distributed manner. Issues of system framework, resource encapsulation and process enactment are discussed, and a case study is present to demonstrate the feasibility.