Multi-agent System for Process Planning in Step-nc Based Manufacturing

In order to realize STEP-NC-oriented computer numerical control machining and achieve optimal performance in manufacturing, a multi-agent system for process planning in STEP-NC based manufacturing was designed. By analyzing the characteristic of STEP-NC data model, a manufacturing feature-oriented process planning method was proposed in this study and the distributed artificial intelligence methods, namely collaborative multi-agent was employed to accomplish process planning of part. The proposed multi-agent system consists of three types of autonomous agents, which are global manager agents, planning agents and manufacturing resource agents, respectively. Process planning can be automatically completed by multiple agents’ cooperation. Each agent is capable of communicating to each other through improved Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language (KQML). At last, one test part was designed and simulated to demonstrate the capabilities of this research in the study.