Using mobile agents to encapsulate manufacturing resources over the Internet

Abstract

The rapid progress of information and networked technologies, especially Internet/Intranet and Web techniques, is driving a fatal revolution of manufacturing modes/enterprises. Networked manufacturing, as a novel manufacturing mode, has caused profound interest in academic and industrial areas. However, during the transformation from the legacy manufacturing mode to the networked manufacturing mode, there exists a bottleneck, that is, how to integrate the legacy manufacturing resources into networked manufacturing systems. Focusing on this problem, this paper is mainly concerned with developing a novel platform for the configuration and encapsulation of legacy manufacturing resources in networked manufacturing systems. The key point to implement this platform is to adopt a Java solution and mobile agent technologies. With the Java solution, the basic framework for this platform can be realized. Through adopting mobile agent technologies, e.g. Aglets, the encapsulating templates and interfaces for all kinds of manufacturing resources can be developed. Based on the dispatch/return mechanisms of mobile agents, the configuration and encapsulation, information integration and share functions for legacy manufacturing resources can be accomplished well.