A CORBA- and MAS-based architecture for agile collaborative manufacturing systems

Abstract

An architecture for building up agile collaborative manufacturing systems (ACMS), which is based on common object request broker architecture (CORBA) and multi-agent system (MAS) paradigm, is proposed in the current paper. First, the diverse manufacturing resources, which may be heterogeneous and physically distributed, are MAS-based agentified and CORBA-based encapsulated as the resource agents. Second, the source agents are registered at the system manager agent (SMA) as member agents and subsequently integrated under the proposed architecture to form an ACMS. Third, the member agents communicate and interact with each other to conduct collaborative manufacturing by means of agent interoperation and human-machine interaction. In order to validate the methodology, an experimental system is developed, where several heterogeneous manufacturing resources are well-integrated via their agents in a plug-and-play manner to establish an ACMS prototype. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed architecture, characterized by distribution and openness, provides a feasible solution for developing ACMS, where integratability, reconfigurability, flexibility and agility are achieved.

Keywords:

• System architecture
• CORBA
• MAS
• Agile manufacturing
• Collaboration
• Flexibility

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the support of the National Basic Research Program of China under grant number 2005CB724107, the National High-Tech. R&D Program for CIMS of China under grant number 2003AA411120 and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant number 50105006. We are very grateful to Dr Janet Efstathiou at the Department of Engineering Science of the University of Oxford for her valuable suggestions and comments.