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(mainly a price and a fund availability for this
purchasing operation), and award a contract to it.
4 PROTOTYPE
IMPLEMENTATION
The proposed model ProMAIS has been
implemented in a simulation form.
This virtual system incorporates heterogenous
agents. It is implemented within a multi-agent
platform called AgentBuilder Pro 1.3
(Reticular, 2000) which is an integrated tool suit for
constructing intelligent software agents. It consists
of two major components: the Toolkit and the
Run-Time system. All agents are implemented using
Java programming language.
Communication among agents was realized
using RMI protocol and the inter-agent messages
were formatted in KQML (Knowledge Query and
Manipulation Languages) format.
In this simulation, the agent execution cycle
consists of the following steps: processing new
messages, determining which rules are applicable to
the current situation, executing the actions specified
by these rules and updating the mental model in
accordance with these rules.
5 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE
WORKS
Manufacturing systems are organizations composed
of heterogeneous entities involved in the production
and the delivery of finished product or services.
Nowadays, the IS for such organization can be
viewed as a collection of sub-systems distributed
between the different entities. This results in the
cooperative information system technology. The
entities communicate via computerized data. The
manufacturing organization must follow the
dynamic of the market and respond quickly to the
customers requirements.
The choice of intelligent software agent
technology provides a natural way to design such
systems because the intrinsic feature of MAS
correspond to those to be preserved in the hoped
production systems. Autonomy, heterogeneity,
openness, cooperation, dynamicity, commitment
etc… are at the heart of our reflection.
ProMAIS, provides the integration of different
entities (divisions) in manufacturing and production
systems. In fact, a cooperative MAS allows each
agent to communicate and cooperate with others
while conserving its autonomy.
ProMAIS is an ongoing project. A major
short-term research goal is to study the position of
humans in the system. The long-term research goal
tends towards fixing the distribution of the global
databases, study the interaction of agents with
databases, the resolution of different kinds of
conflict resulting from the heterogeneity of data
sources and then to implement this approach in a
real manufacturing enterprise.
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