The application of ZEUS agents in manufacturing environments

Author

Glanzer, Klaus ; Hammerle, A. ; Geurts, Ralf

Author_Institution

Inst. of Flexible Autom., Vienna Univ. of Technol., Austria

fYear

2001

fDate

2001

Firstpage

628

Lastpage

632

Abstract

The concept of holonic manufacturing systems (HMS) is the key to meet future demands of highly dynamic production environments. A hierarchy of holons, which are autonomous and cooperative entities, represents the internal structure of a HMS, where software agents embody the intelligent nuclei of holons. The paper deals with the implementation of a multi-agent system with ZEUS, an open source, JAVA ^TM-based, agent building toolkit from British Telecom. Our application is based on a job shop scheduling problem, where task allocation is achieved through negotiation between cooperating agents. Moreover, we focus on the interaction with legacy software

Keywords

computer integrated manufacturing; knowledge representation; multi-agent systems; production control; software agents; British Telecom; cooperating agents; highly dynamic production environments; holonic manufacturing systems; intelligent nuclei; internal structure; job shop scheduling problem; legacy software; multi-agent system; negotiation; open source JAVA-based agent building toolkit; software agents; task allocation; Application software; Buildings; Intelligent agent; Intelligent structures; Java; Manufacturing systems; Multiagent systems; Production systems; Software agents; Telecommunications;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Database and Expert Systems Applications, 2001. Proceedings. 12th International Workshop on

Conference_Location

Munich

Print_ISBN

0-7695-1230-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/DEXA.2001.953129

Filename

953129