The production management system used by most manufacturers today is comprised of disconnected planning and execution processes, and lacks the support for interoperability and collaboration needed for enterprise-wide integration. This situation often prevents the manufacturer from fully exploring market opportunities in a timely fashion. To address this problem, we are exploring an agent-based approach to intelligent enterprise integration. In this approach, a set of agents with specialized expertise can be quickly assembled to help with the gathering of relevant information and knowledge, to cooperate with each other and with other parts of the production management system and humans to arrive at timely decisions in dealing with various enterprise scenarios. The proposed multi-agent system, including its architecture and implementation, are presented and demonstrated through an example integration scenario involving real planning and execution software systems.

Recent developments have made it possible to interoperate complex business applications at much lower costs. Application interoperation, along with business process reengineering can result in significant savings by eliminating work created by disconnected business processes due to isolated business applications. However, we believe much greater productivity benefits can be achieved by facilitating timely decision-making, utilizing information from multiple enterprise perspectives. The CIIMPLEX Enterprise Integration Architecture is designed to enable such productivity gains by helping people to carry out integrated enterprise scenarios. An enterprise scenario is triggered typically by some external event (e.g., delay of a shipment). The goal of an enterprise scenario is to make the right decisions considering the full context of the problem. Enterprise scenarios are difficult for people to carry out because of the interdependencies among various actions. One can easily be overwhelmed by the large amount of information. We propose the use of software agents to help gathering relevant information and present them in the appropriate context of an enterprise scenario. The CIIMPLEX enterprise integration architecture is based on the FAIME methodology for application interoperation and plug-and-play. It also explores the use of software agents in application plug-and-play.

In todays global economy, manufacturing industries require to connect disparate applications seamlessly, They require not only to exchange data and transactions, but present a single business process image to their employess in the office, headquarters, and on the plant floor. Also, it is imperative that small and medium size manufacturing companies deploy manufacturing execution system applications in conjunction with modem enterprise resource programs for cycle time reduction and better quality. This paper presents the experiences and reflections on a project that created a tool set to assist the above be accomplished not only in a shorter cycle time, with a better predictable quality, and with a object oriented framework, but also a tool set that allows the manufacturer to still use legacy applications. This framework has the capability of plug and play so that future migrations and re-engineering of processes are more productive.Downloaded From: http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/ on 06/20/2016 Terms of Use: http://spiedigitallibrary.org/ss/TermsOfUse.aspx 290 Before we evaluate the progress of the Framework for Adaptive Interoperability of Manufacturing Enterprises project and examine its achievements with respect to more traditional approaches for integration of applications that have different architectures and/or interfaces, we must give a brief summary of the FAIME project.

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