The potential of multi-agent systems in virtual manufacturing enterprises

Manufacturers operate today in a constantly moving market, characterized by short product life cycles and increased demand for flexibility. In the same way, the ability to respond rapidly to changing market opportunities by quickly providing the required combination of design and manufacturing capabilities becomes a key issue to maintain competitively. In this context, the concept of virtual enterprise takes an increasing importance in supporting future business engagements and fulfilling technology requirements. As short-term consortia of companies to address fast changing opportunities, the virtual enterprise may be modeled by a multi-agent system representation. Such an approach allows modeling the heterogeneous actors of the real world in terms of agents, focusing on communication and collaboration between them. The feasibility of the multi-agent approach has already been demonstrated in the manufacturing and financial fields. This paper shows how a multi agent approach may be used in the modeling of virtual enterprises. An example of an agent, the "controller agent", will be described in details. The multi-agent system used, called PVS98, has been developed in the framework of an Eureka project. It relies on a KQML-like architecture and on an enterprise ontology.