Virtual Manufacturing : Tools for improving Design and Production

International audienceThe research area "Virtual Manufacturing" can be defined as an integrated manufacturing environment which can enhance one or several levels of decision and control in manufacturing process. Several domains can be addressed: Product and Process Design, Process and Production Planning, Machine Tool, Robot and Manufacturing System. As automation technologies such as CAD/CAM have substantially shortened the time required to design products, Virtual Manufacturing will have a similar effect on the manufacturing phase thanks to the modelling, simulation and optimisation of the product and the processes involved in its fabrication

The Virtual Manufacturing concept: Scope, Socio-Economic Aspects and Future Trends

International audienceThe research area "Virtual Manufacturing (VM)'' is the use of information technology and computer simulation to model real world manufacturing processes for the purpose of analysing and understanding them. As automation technologies such as CAD/CAM have substantially shortened the time required to design products, Virtual Manufacturing will have a similar effect on the manufacturing phase thanks to the modelling, simulation and optimisation of the product and the processes involved in its fabrication. After a description of Virtual Manufacturing (definitions and scope), we present some socio-economic factors of VM and finaly some "hot topics'' for the future are proposed

Ontology-Based Capability Management for Distributed Problem Solving in the Manufacturing Domain

Providing services within multiagent systems, an agent has to register itself with a distinct description of its main capabilities in yellow page services. If another agent is requesting to solve a specific task, it has to be decided whether or not the requested agent is capable of performing the task successfully. We are assuming that task requirements as well as capabilities are specified using ontologies. Decision is easy if the concepts of requested task requirements are directly mapping to concepts of provided capabilities. However, concept inequality may occur. Especially in production engineering with its increasing concern of knowledge about sophisticated manufacturing processes, relying on simple concept equality is not suitable to fulfill demands of current industrial applications. Thus, enhanced methods like ontology-based capability management presented in this paper have to be established to address this problem. For the case of indi#erent concepts we are introducing a conflict-based approach for capability negotiation as well as an application scenario for this approach in the manufacturing domain

Emerging Virtual Enterprises

Since consideration of individual customer' demands is of increasing importance, enterprises are in need of more flexible production for highly customized products even in serial production. Hence, innovative concepts for improved information logistics are necessary for competitive manufacturing. This paper presents an approach for integrated agent-based process planning and production control and focuses on further applications like temporal logistics networks, which will gain benefit from agent technology. Due to broad application of techniques like multiagent systems and bottom-up integration of innovative management concepts, a new kind of interenterprise cooperation will arise, which will lead to "emerging virtual enterprises"

A Generic Time Management Service for Distributed Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent systems are well suited for building large software systems. A great deal of these complex systems includes process flows that are concerned with time or are even time-critical. The activities of these process flows are often executed in distributed autonomous subsystems that have to be synchronized with respect to the superordinated task execution. To be able to build such systems and test their behavior adequately, it is often advantageous and sometimes necessary to simulate them in the run-up to their practical use. Testing and simulation of process flows within multi-agent systems requires synchronization of the participating agents with respect to the global simulation time. In this paper, a design proposal and a service implementation for time management is presented, which takes care of the special requirements imposed by multi-agent settings. This so called time service is implemented as a FIPA-compliant agent, and can be used to couple heterogeneous subsystems implemented on different agent platforms. 1