Towards Web Services Oriented Agent-Based Manufacturing

The revolutionary approach of manufacturing systems design is changing from an isolated island of resources and data to a dynamic collaborative alliance of companies best known as a virtual enterprise. The virtual enterprise can be considered as a scenario that emerges in a world where individual companies come together as a coalition to fulfill the market requirements. Web Services technology is an emerging paradigm in establishing a standard environment for legacy applications integration over the Internet. Using Web Services and related standards has made it a best choice to implement a virtual enterprise in heterogeneous software platforms. In this paper we propose to integrate Virtual Enterprise, Web Services, and Software Agents technologies, to realize inter-enterprise collaborations while maintaining privacy and security. We believe that the combination of the paradigm of virtual enterprise, the standards of Web services, and the unique characteristics of intelligent software agents, is the best answer to future Web-based manufacturing. We define an architecture consisting of Web services and intelligent software agents and discuss how this combination has the ability to reason and change its static policies to a dynamic collaboration.