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The centralized planning and control that has defined the traditional information processing structure of manufacturing systems is no longer suited to the current rapidly changing manufacturing environment. For efficient use of manufacturing resources and increased flexibility, it is necessary to migrate to a distributed information processing system in which individual entities can work cooperatively towards overall system goals. The next generation of manufacturing systems requires such an information technology framework to integrate the system components and activities into a larger collaborative enterprise. This paper describes a multi-agent approach to concurrent design, manufacturability analysis, process planning, routing and scheduling. A heterogeneous multi-agent concurrent engineering system consisting of multiple feature-based design sub-systems, multiple simulated shop-floor resource groups, a supervisory control interface and the coordination mechanisms for multi-agent cooperation, has been developed. The architecture of this distributed system and the associated implementation issues are discussed.

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A concurrent engineering system has been developed using a multiagent architecture to address the issues of design, manufacturability analysis, incremental process planning, dynamic routing, and scheduling simultaneously The system includes a feature-based intelligent design subsystem for prismatic components, a shop-floor subsystem to represent available resources, and a supervisory control interface to manage the shop-floor resources The evaluation of the system used a simulated shop-floor environment with four production machines for the design of a prismatic component. As the design progressed, manufacturability was evaluated and shop-floor planning was carried out concurrently Valid process plans, routing, and scheduling were generated The system is now being extended to incorporate additional design systems and shop-floor environments