Multi-agent Architectures for Concurrent Design and Manufacturing

Manufacturing industries are facing increasing competitive challenges in maintaining their existing markets and improving their capability to respond efficiently to rapidly changing customer needs. New architectures are required for the next generation of manufacturing systems to meet these challenges. Such architectures have to satisfy new requirements for increased integrability, configurability, adaptability, extendibility, agility, and reliability. Two new multiagent architectures for next-generation manufacturing are described: MetaMorph and DIDE. These demonstrate two different intelligent system approaches to distributed concurrent design and manufacturing.