Towards a standardised framework for a multi-agent system approach for cooperation in an original design manufacturing company

Design chain cooperation has attracted the attention of original design manufacturing (ODM) companies. Promoting design chain cooperation needs ODM companies and their design chain members to communicate and cooperate in a computer network environment. Owing to the characteristics of agents, the multi-agent system (MAS) has been considered a promising enabling technology for design chain cooperation and several all-purpose MAS development approaches have been proposed. Additionally, MAS have been applied to design chain cooperation in many studies. However, most of these studies focus on a specific design issue and lead to a particular solution. None provides a standardised MAS development framework for ODM companies to implement their design chain cooperation. Considering the industry standard, design chain operations reference-model (DCOR), newly proposed by Supply Chain Council has been recognised as a good tool for design process analysis, this research has integrated this industry standard into an existing MAS development approach to develop a standardised MAS development framework for ODM companies to implement design chain cooperation. The framework is composed of three phases. In the design chain cooperation requirements modelling phase, the desired design chain cooperation operations are described with DCOR. Next, the MAS specification development phase determines the specification of agents by using an existing MAS approach. Finally, the MAS implementation and test phase implements the MAS specification on JADE platform to support the cooperation requirements of the ODM company.