Agent technology has been considered as an important approach for developing distributed intelligent manufacturing systems. A number of researchers have attempted to apply agent technology to manufacturing enterprise integration, supply chain management, manufacturing planning, scheduling and control, materials handling, and holonic manufacturing systems. This paper gives a brief survey of some related projects in this area, and discusses some key issues in developing agent-based manufacturing systems such as agent technology for enterprise integration and supply chain management, agent encapsulation, system architectures, dynamic system reconfiguration, learning, design and manufacturability assessments, distributed dynamic scheduling, integration of planning and scheduling, concurrent scheduling and execution, factory control structures, potential tools and standards for developing agent-based manufacturing systems. An extensive annotated bibliography is provided.

Agent-Based Systems for Intelligent Manufacturing: A State-of-the-Art Survey

Many researchers have demonstrated that the organizational design employed by an agent system can have a significant, quantitative effect on its performance characteristics A range of organizational strategies have emerged from this line of research, each with different strengths and weaknesses In this article we present a survey of the major organizational paradigms used in multi-agent systems These include hierarchies, holarchies, coalitions, teams, congregations, societies, federations, markets, and matrix organizations We will provide a description of each, discuss their advantages and disadvantages, and provide examples of how they may be instantiated and maintained This summary will facilitate the comparative evaluation of organizational styles, allowing designers to first recognize the spectrum of possibilities, and then guiding the selection of an appropriate organizational design for a particular domain and environment

https://cse.unl.edu/~lksoh/Classes/CSCE990AMAS_Spring13/Seminar04.pdf

A survey of multi-agent organizational paradigms

INGENIAS is both a methodology and a set of tools for development of multi-agent systems (MAS). As a methodology, it tries to integrate results from other proposals and considers the MAS from five complementary viewpoints: organization, agent, tasks/goals, interactions, and environment. It is supported by a set of tools for modelling (graphical editor), documentation and code generation (for different agent platforms). INGENIAS is the result of the experience developing MAS in different areas, such as workflow management systems, recommender systems, Robocode teams, and PC assistants

Agent oriented software engineering with INGENIAS

INGENIAS provides a notation for modeling multi-agent systems (MAS) and a well-defined collection of activities to guide the development process of an MAS in the tasks of analysis, design, verification, and code generation, supported by an integrated set of tools—the INGENIAS Development Kit (IDK). These tools, as well as the INGENIAS notation, are based on five meta-models that define the different views and concepts from which a multi-agent system can be described. Using meta-models has the advantage of flexibility for evolving the methodology and adopting changes to the notation. In fact, one of the purposes in the conception of this methodology is to integrate progressive advances in agent technology, towards a standard for agent-based systems modeling that could facilitate the adoption of the agent approach by the software industry. The chapter presents a summary of the INGENIAS notation, development process, and support tools. The use of INGENIAS is demonstrated in an e-business case study. This case study includes concerns about the development process, modeling with agent concepts, and implementation with automated code generation facilities. IDEA GROUP PUBLISHING This chapter appears in the book, Agent-Oriented Methodologies edited by Brian Henderson-Sellers and Paolo Giorgini © 2005, Idea Group Inc. 701 E. Chocolate Avenue, Suite 200, Hershey PA 17033-1240, USA Tel: 717/533-8845; Fax 717/533-8661; URL-http://www.idea-group.com ITB11106

The INGENIAS Methodology and Tools

An agent-based framework for supply chain coordination in construction

The multiagent systems approach of knowledge- level cooperation between autonomous agents promises significant benefits to distributed systems engineering, such as enhanced interoperability, scalability, and reconfigurability. However, thus far, because of the innate difficulty of constructing multiagent systems, this promise has been largely unrealized. Hence there is an emerging desire among agent developers to move away from developing point solutions to point problems in favor of developing methodologies and toolkits for building distributed multiagent systems. This philosophy led to the development of the ZEUS Agent Building Toolkit, which facilitates the rapid development of collaborative agent applications through the provision of a library of agent- level components and an environment to support the agent-building process. The ZEUS toolkit is a synthesis of established agent technologies with some novel solutions to provide an integrated collaborative agent-building environment.

Zeus: A toolkit for building distributed multiagent systems

The innate difficulty of constructing multi-agent systems has motivated agent developers to move away from developing point solutions to point problems in favour of developing methodologies and toolkits for building distributed multi-agent systems. This philosophy led to the development of the ZEUS Agent Building Toolkit, which facilitates the rapid development of collaborative agent applications through the provision of a library of agent-level components and an environment to support the agent building process. The ZEUS toolkit is a synthesis of established agent technologies with some novel solutions to provide an integrated collaborative agent building environment.

ZEUS: a toolkit and approach for building distributed multi-agent systems

Visualising the behaviour of systems with distributed data, control and process is a notoriously difficult task. Each component in the distributed system has only a local view of the whole set-up, and the onus is on the user to integrate, into a coherent whole, the large amounts of limited information they provide. In this paper, we describe an architecture and an implemented system for visualising and controlling distributed multi-agent applications. The system comprises a suite of tools, with each tool providing a different perspective of the application being visualised. Each tool interrogates the components of the distributed application, collates the returned information and presents this information to users in an appropriate manner. This in essence shifts the burden of inference from the user to the visualiser. Our visualiser has been evaluated on four distributed multi-agent systems: a travel management application, a telecommunications network management application, a business process management demonstrator, and an electronic commerce application. Lastly, we briefly show how the suite of tools can be used together for debugging multi-agent applications an approach we refer to as debugging via corroboration.

Visualising and debugging distributed multi-agent systems

The increasing popularity of the Internet provides personal computer users with direct access to a wealth of information sources and services, and potentially a massive global marketplace. Unfortunately current home shopping systems are primitive; what the consumer wants is a personal shopping agent - an intelligent, reliable proxy who is aware of personal preferences, and who can take over the tedious task of searching the Internet for the best possible deal. Likewise retailers would like to use the Internet to attract a much larger volume of potential customers, who could be serviced quickly and efficiently at a much lower cost. This vision is seductive, so why has it not yet been realised? This paper considers why agent-based commerce is inherently difficult, and advocates collaborative agent technology as a means of more easily building distributed marketplaces. To illustrate this principle we have built a prototype multi-agent virtual marketplace with ZEUS, a generic collaborative agent tool-kit.

Building Electronic Marketplaces with the ZEUS Agent Tool-kit

The tool-kit facilitates the creation of agents by providing a design methodology. The first stage is for the developers to specify the attributes of individual agents through a visual editor. Once an agent is defined, another editor facilitates the definition of each task the agent is capable of performing. At this point the developer only needs to specify each task in terms of what facts are produced and consumed. Once all the agents, tasks and facts have been specified, the Generator tool can be invoked, this creates a Java source code implementation for each agent, and a stub for each task. The individual agent source programs can be compiled into executable agents, and so the developer’s sole task is to provide an implementation for each task.

https://www.aaai.org/Papers/Workshops/1998/WS-98-10/WS98-10-028.pdf

Jaron C. Collis

Papers

Zeus: A toolkit for building distributed multiagent systems

ZEUS: a toolkit and approach for building distributed multi-agent systems

Visualising and debugging distributed multi-agent systems

Building Electronic Marketplaces with the ZEUS Agent Tool-kit

ZEUS: A Collaborative Agents Toolkit