Agent-based Workflow Management Research Articles

Agent-based Smart Gateway for RFID-enabled real-time wireless manufacturing

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology enables real-time traceability, visibility and interoperability of manufacturing resources and thus improves the performance of shop-floor planning, execution and control. However, a big challenge faced by manufacturers now is to deal with various RFID/Auto-ID technologies which are necessary in different production situations yet entailing different development technologies. This paper presents an innovative all-in-one Smart Gateway technology for capturing real-time production data from various manufacturing resources attached to different types of RFID/Auto-ID devices. Each of such manufacturing resources forms a smart object (SO) while agent concept is introduced for encapsulating the heterogeneous SOs. Taking advantages of web services, agents are developed and managed in a standard way following service-oriented architecture (SOA). Smart objects and agents are dynamically deployed and reconfigured at a Smart Gateway in a ‘plug and play’ fashion. The joint work among smart objects is governed by an agent-based workflow management (AWFM) mechanism. The proposed framework and core technologies are demonstrated by an assembly workstation case where a Smart Gateway is deployed for defining, configuring and executing assembly operations on a real-time basis.

Agent-based workflow management for RFID-enabled real-time reconfigurable manufacturing

Recent developments in wireless technologies have created opportunities for developing reconfigurable wireless manufacturing systems with real-time traceability, visibility and interoperability in shop-floor planning, execution and control. This paper proposes to use agent-based workflow management as a mechanism to facilitate interactions among RFID-enabled reconfigurable manufacturing resources. A production process is modelled as a workflow network. Its nodes correspond to the work (process), and its edges to flows of control and data. Nodes are represented as agents and edges as messages. As a sandwich layer, agents wrap manufacturing services around a work-cell and their operational logics/intelligence for cost-effectively collecting and processing real-time manufacturing data, forming so-called work-cell gateways. A reference framework for a shop-floor gateway is proposed based on the three key components: Workflow management, manufacturing services universal description, discovery and integration (namely MS-UDDI) and work-cell agents. Work-cell agents are packaged, registered and published at MS-UDDI as web services which are easily reused and reconfigured in the workflow for a specific production process. Finally, a prototype system is presented to demonstrate how the proposed method is used to define and execute a real-time reconfigurable manufacturing project.

Implementation of real-time shop floor manufacturing using RFID technologies

This paper presents an easy-to-deploy and simple-to-use gateway framework with which advanced applications can be developed to achieve real-time shop floor manufacturing using RFID technologies. Some key enabling technologies including shop floor gateway, workstation gateway, RFID-enabled smart objects and agent-based workflow management are integrated into the framework to implement real-time manufacturing data collection, visibility and traceability. The methodologies and technologies proposed in this paper will enable manufacturing enterprises to improve shop floor productivity and quality, reduce the wastes of manufacturing resources, cut the costs in manufacturing logistics, reduce the risk and improve the efficiency in cross-border customs logistics as well as in online supervision. [Received 2 January 2009; Revised 14 July 2009; Accepted 20 July 2009]

The design of a JADE-based autonomous workflow management system for collaborative SoC design

Given a fast changing electronics goods marketplace, designers of integrated circuits and components need to be more competitive, efficient, flexible, and use collaborative workflow to reduce time-to-market and a project’s life cycle. In recent years, agent-based workflow management systems (WfMS) have been widely used to monitor and control business design processes. In this paper, intelligent agents are applied to the collaborative system-on-chip (SoC) design environment. The proposed JADE-based autonomous workflow management system (JAWMS) uses a workflow coordination mechanism and an agent integration mechanism to enable the analysis, management and interaction of automated design processes. The workflow coordination mechanism uses five domain specific agents to perform the workflow enactment services and a generic agent to control the system flow logic. The system kernel of JAWMS follows the specifications of the workflow reference model provided by the workflow management coalition (WfMC). The agent integration mechanism supports an agent to interact with other JADE-based agent platforms and to coordinate and monitor workflow coordination messages. All agents are written in the Java language using the JADE platform and work together to perform flexible, adaptive and dynamic design tasks in an autonomous and collaborative way. JAWMS facilitates SoC design and team interaction in a collaborative but distributed product development environment.

Agent-based workflow management systems (WfMSs)

Workflow management systems (WfMSs) based on agent technology can cope with the rapidly evolving business environment better than most other systems as they are more flexible and open. In this paper we describe a possible architecture of such a system by means of our prototype WfMS called JBees. The combination of collaborating agents and the Coloured Petri Net (CPN)-formalism in JBees enables a flexible and adaptive system with the possibility of simulation, analysis, and monitoring of the process execution in order to identify potential inconsistencies and to provide appropriate information to the workflow administrator for the purpose of the process improvement.

Agent-based workflow management in collaborative product development on the Internet

Product development is collaborative, involving multi-disciplinary functions and heterogeneous tools. Teamwork is essential through seamless tool integration and better co-ordination of human activities. This paper proposes to use workflow management as a mechanism to facilitate the teamwork in a collaborative product development environment where remote Web-based Decision Support Systems (TeleDSS) are extensively used by team members who are geographically distributed. The workflow of a project is modelled as a network. Its nodes correspond to the work (packages), and its edges to flows of control and data. The concept of agents is introduced to define nodes and the concept of messages to define edges. As a sandwich layer, agents act as special-purpose application clients for the remote TeleDSS application servers. Agents are delegated to manipulate the corresponding TeleDSS on behalf of their human users. Details of the proceedings are recorded by agents as their properties for future references or shared uses by other team members. Through flow messages, agents are able to share input and output data and request for remote services. One of the major contributions is that agents, once defined, can be reused for different projects without any changes.