Title: Manufacturing planner agents in network enterprises

Authors: Lanfranco Imberti

Addresses: Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Meccanica, Sez. Tecnologie Meccaniche e Produzione, Via Bonardi 9, 20133 Milano, Italy

Abstract: The negotiation phase between the customer and the supplier in network enterprises operating in the automotive industry in the field of chip removal is a critical activity for the suppliers. Indeed the suppliers, in order to anticipate their competitors, need to propose in a very short time a reliable evaluation of time and costs related to the production of the parts required by the potential customer. Since the capability to provide this kind of evaluation in a short time gives competitive advantage to enterprises, in order to support the supplier during this phase, a manufacturing planner agent is under development, within the project ||Distributed process and production planning in manufacturing enterprise networks||. The target is to automatically create non-linear working plans mapping all the operations on the machines constituting the system, where ||non-linear|| means that alternative sequences and alternative operations are considered. Since the agent is part of a system based on a distributed architecture, it is extremely important to use an effective standard concerning data treatment. This topic will also be addressed in the paper.

Keywords: network enterprise; agent-based manufacturing; alternative process plans; performance evaluation; process planning; integrated manufacturing systems; virtual enterprise.

DOI: 10.1504/IJATM.2003.003810

International Journal of Automotive Technology and Management, 2003 Vol.3 No.3/4, pp.315 - 327

Published online: 10 May 2004 *

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