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Abstract: In the highly competitive market, cooperative multi-agent transaction and negotiation mechanism have become an important research topic. This paper uses multi-agent technology to construct a multi-section flexible manufacturing system (FMS) model, and utilizes simulation to build a manufacturing environment based on JADE framework for multi-agent to combine with dispatching rules, such as shortest imminent processing time (SIPT), first come first serve (FCFS) earliest due date (EDD), and Buffer Sequence. This paper finds that using multi-agent technique for multi-section FMS model can enhance the production efficiency in practice. Meanwhile, in this study, multi-agent systems combined with dynamic dispatching can be used to identify the best dispatching rules combination for achieving largest throughput, and thus it can provide the reference for production scheduling in advance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Recently, manufacturing systems have become large scale and complex. The social scientific approach is one of the promising methods to facilitate effective operation for the resource allocation problems in manufacturing systems, since the approach takes an analogy of social systems which are optimal and robust in nature. In this paper, the authors first propose a modeling methodology for an oligopolistic virtual market, and develop an oligopolistic virtual market as an experimental model. Then they clarify several important characteristics of the oligopolistic virtual market by computer simulation experiments, and try to apply the proposed method into a utility computing operational problem to validate its effectiveness into resource allocation problems. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 164(1): 77–85, 2008; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/eej.20628 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To meet the dynamically changing market requirements, production enterprises are collaborating in the form of production chains to share life cycle engineering data/knowledge as well as to improve production efficiency and product quality. This paper proposes a model-based control mechanism and intelligent control layer, which is used to control the operation of chained production enterprises. The control mechanism is achieved by defining control levels as mapped to production chain topology using the concept of operation isolation area. Production constraints and control rules are defined as attached to structure elements. The proposed control layer is used to decide the suitable operation of the selected production chain, in view of process constraints and operating conditions. A case study of a generic production chain with recycling is used to show the proposed control mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simulation by a software model, is one of the most frequently used techniques for the analysis and design of manufacturing systems. In the software engineering research area, the object-oriented approach has fully demonstrated to be an effective technique with respect to the design and implementation phases of complex software projects. Even if object-oriented programming has proven to be a powerful technique, a systematic design method should also be used in order to implement reliable software, in particular in the development of simulation models. This paper presents a new procedure to develop flexible manufacturing system (FMS) simulation models, based on the UML analysis/design tools and on the ARENA® simulation language. The two main features of the proposed procedure are the definition of a systematic conceptual procedure to design FMS simulation models and of a set of rules for the conceptual model translation in a simulation language. The goal is to improve the software development efficiency through a rule-based approach and to add some of the fundamental object-oriented features to the ARENA® simulation environment. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]