A Multi-Agent Based Approach for Manufacturing Grid Workflow

The Manufacturing Grid (MG) workflow can be defined as a composition of manufacturing activities which execute on heterogeneous and distributed manufacturing resources in a virtual organization to accomplish a specific goal. This paper will describe an MG workflow management system with intelligent, multi-agent support in a dynamic Web environment. Intelligent agents work together individually and cooperate with each other to perform the appropriate tasks in the MG Workflow system. This service agent encapsulates a service that is associated with the manufacturing resources. With help from a multi-agent, the system can organize the work processes and dynamically schedule the services according to the QoS (Quality of Service) capabilities of the service agents. This system is able to manage the MG workflow with more flexibility, and more efficiency.