Towards a cooperative distributed manufacturing management framework

Advanced manufacturing systems need to be developed for enterprises to cooperate with each other in order to survive in the increasingly competitive global market. In this paper, manufacturing management issues are addressed at three levels: virtual enterprise (inter-enterprise), enterprise (intra-enterprise) and shop floor levels. An Internet enabled framework based on Web Services and agents for cooperative manufacturing management is proposed. An integration environment consisting of an agent based scheduling system, a Web based remote monitoring and control system, and corresponding services is designed and developed for the management, monitoring and control of the shop floor. Implementation details of the shop floor management environment are presented and some future work is prospected.