Using Mobile Agent Techniques for Distributed Manufacturing Network Management

Manufacturing industries are facing increasingly competitive challenges in maintaining their existing markets and improving their capability to respond efficiently to rapidly changing customer needs. As a result, it is inevitable that modern manufacturing will move towards integrating their activities with their customers, suppliers and competitors into a supply chain through a computer network. This, thus, reflects the increasing complexity of computer network which supports the overall organisational and manufacturing environment. Existing centralised client-server based network management frameworks have suffered from numerous problems such as insufficient scalability, interoperability, reliability, and flexibility. Hence, Network Management (NM) becomes a critical issue in today’s rapidly changing distributed network environment. The goal of this paper is to show how we will apply mobile agent technology to an integrated network management framework in the field of distributed manufacturing. We propose a virtual clustering application framework, which is intended to show the integration of the manufacturing enterprise information and production system. In addition, a mobile agent framework will be required to provide a discussion regarding the ideas of mobile agent application in terms of the distributed network management.