The Use of Agents and Objects to Integrate Virtual Enterprises

The manufacturing complex for the Department of Energy (DOE) is distributed: design laboratories, manufacturing facilities, and industrial partners. Designers must have a concurrent engineering environment to support all aspects of the cradle-to-grave product realization process across the distributed sites. Engineers must be able to analyze and simulate processes, retrieve and process heterogeneous information, both archived and current, and access multiple databases. Manufacturers must be able to coordinate activities of various manufacturing centers, which may involve a negotiation process. Furthermore, Sandia must be able to export manufacturing capabilities, such as on-machine acceptance, to outside suppliers. A key element to making this a reality is a flexible information architecture. The DOE information architecture must support a wide-area virtual enterprise, with distributed intelligent software components. The architecture must provide for asynchronous communication; multiple programming languages and operating systems; incorporation of geographically distributed manufacturing services; various hardware platforms; and heterogeneous workstations, PCs, machine tool controllers, and specialpurpose compute engines. Further, it is critical that manufacturing facilities are not isolated from design, planning, and other business activities and that information flows easily and bidirectionally between these activities. To accomplish this seamlessly, heterogeneous knowledge must be exchanged across both domain and organizational boundaries. Distributed object and software agent technologies are two methods for connecting such engineering and manufacturing systems. The two technologies have overlapping goals — interoperability and architectural support for integrating software components — though to date little or no integration of the two technologies has been made. The primary difference between these two technologies is that distributed object technologies focus on the problems inherent in connecting distributed heterogeneous systems whereas software agent technologies focus on the problems involved with knowledge exchange across domain boundaries. This project addresses the integration of these technologies in support of concurrent engineering, team collaboration, and manufacturing across organizational and geographic boundaries. We discuss our experiences with both technologies, explore both in the context of enterprise integration, and suggest future research in this area.