Collaborative manufacturing resource scheduling using Agent-based Web Services

Abstract

The rapidly changing needs and opportunities of today's global market require unprecedented levels of inter-operability to integrate diverse information systems to share knowledge and collaborate among organisations. The combination of web services and software agents opens up a sophisticated computing paradigm for meeting such requirements. This paper proposes a component called Agent-based Web Service (AWS) to provide manufacturing scheduling services for enterprise collaboration. A unique property of this AWS-based integration approach is that the scheduling process of an order is orchestrated on the internet through negotiation among AWSs. Moreover, the bid proposed by an AWS is supported by the dynamic scheduling results of manufacturing resources inside the enterprise. A prototype system for AWS-based manufacturing scheduling is implemented and connected to the backend multiagent dynamic manufacturing scheduling system.