Agent-Oriented Manufacturing Scheduling Services for Enterprise Cooperation

The rapidly changing needs and opportunities of today's global market require unprecedented levels of interoperability to integrate diverse information systems to share knowledge and collaborate among organizations. The combination of Web services and software agents opens 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. Enterprise level services other than resource scheduling can be replenished later on by introducing a richer set of AWSs. A unique property of this AWS based integration approach is that the scheduling process of an order is orchestrated on the Internet through the negotiation among AWSs. Moreover, the bid proposed by an AWS is supported with dynamic scheduling results of manufacturing resources inside the enterprise. A prototype system for AWS-based manufacturing scheduling is implemented and connected to the backend multi-agent dynamic manufacturing scheduling system.