The dynamic variations in demand patterns and produ ct mix, driven by unpredictable changes in a global market, are placing manufactur ing systems under significant pressure. In order to remain competitive, manu factu...The dynamic variations in demand patterns and produ ct mix, driven by unpredictable changes in a global market, are placing manufactur ing systems under significant pressure. In order to remain competitive, manu facturing organisations must satisfy demands timely. This implies that companies must increase product varieties, reduce time-to-market, shorten product-life cycles and at the same time maintain good quality and reduce investment costs. Conventional methodologies for planning and control have been found to be inadeq uate in meeting these challenges. Agile manufacturing is the state-of-the-art concept that provides enterprises with the opportunity to react rapidly and cos t-effectively to changes that occur in their environment. Several paradigms suc h as Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS), Bionic Manufacturing Systems (BMS) and Fractal Factory have been developed to enable manufacturing systems achieve agi lity by integrating manufacturing activities into a coordinated framework. Despi te the differences in their origin (HMS from social organisation, BMS from biolo gy and Fractal Factory from Mathematics), these paradigms have overlapping conce pts and one of the most important is hierarchical organisational structure. This paper presents a conceptual hierarchically structured multi-agent architec ture for manufacturing systems’ modelling. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) provide su itable techniques for implementing the above concepts and as a branch of Distrib uted Artificial Intelligence (DAI), have characteristics that have been explored in various applications. Such characteristics include self-organisation, flexi bility, scalability, and robustness. The proposed architecture provides a suit able decision-making framework where each agent represents a node in the hier archic tree of manufacturing systems such as the company as whole, each plant wi thin the company, each cell or line within the plant, each machine in a cell or line. Each agent has the ability to perceive and evaluate changes that occur in the manufacturing environment, interact with other agents in the system in order to reach an optimal decision, and act based on that decision. In other words, agents respond timely to unexpected changes by continuously co-ordinating t heir activities, and allocating manufacturing resources dynamically based on act ual shop-floor situation. The flexibility of this architecture also lies in its ability to accommodate both homogenous and heterogeneous agents, and its capabi lity for the dynamic addition and removal of agents using a conceptual intellige nt communication mechanism similar to the blackboard messaging system. A Bidding -Based Scheme (BBS) would be used to generate and evaluate alternative scenario at run-time. In addition, this architecture can be extended to meet the requir ements of enterprise integration.展开更多
Agent-oriented approach is increasingly showing its magic power in a diversity of fields, specifically, ubiquitous computing and smart environment. Meanwhile, it is considered the next creative issue is to interconnec...Agent-oriented approach is increasingly showing its magic power in a diversity of fields, specifically, ubiquitous computing and smart environment. Meanwhile, it is considered the next creative issue is to interconnect and integrate isolated smart spaces in real world together into a higher level space known as a hyperspace. In this paper, an agent-oriented architecture, which involves the techniques of mobile agents, middleware, and embedded artificial intelligence, is proposed. Detailed implementations describe our efforts on the design of terminal device, user interface, agents, and AI展开更多
Currently, agent-based computing is an active research area, and great efforts have been made towards the agent-oriented programming both from a theoretical and practical view. However, most of them assume that there ...Currently, agent-based computing is an active research area, and great efforts have been made towards the agent-oriented programming both from a theoretical and practical view. However, most of them assume that there is no uncertainty in agents＇ mental state and their environment. In other words, under this assumption agent developers are just allowed to specify how his agent acts when the agent is 100% sure about what is true/false. In this paper, this unrealistic assumption is removed and a new agent-oriented probabilistic logic programming language is proposed, which can deal with uncertain information about the world. The programming language is based on a combination of features of probabilistic logic programming and imperative programming.展开更多
An increasing number of social computational systems consist of a great amount of autonomous entities and operate in highly dynamic and unpredictable environments. To construct such systems needs to seek high-level ab...An increasing number of social computational systems consist of a great amount of autonomous entities and operate in highly dynamic and unpredictable environments. To construct such systems needs to seek high-level abstrac- tion to manage the complexity of the systems and novel mechanism to support their characteristics, i.e., dynamism and flexibility. Agent-oriented programming （AOP） is con- sidered as a potential paradigm for developing such systems by exhibiting a number of characteristics, such as autonomy, flexibility, social ability, etc. However, current researches on AOP mainly focus on the construction of multi-agent system （MAS） with theory and language facilities inspired from arti- ficial intelligence （AI） and distributed AI, seldom considering and integrating the proven principles and practices of pro- gramming and software engineering. Moreover, abstractions and mechanism based on AI are inadequate for developing dynamic and flexible MAS in open environment. This paper proposes a novel AOP approach, namely Oragent, for con- structing and implementing dynamic and flexible systems. From a software engineering perspective, Oragent integrates organizational concepts and mechanism into AOP language, and support the dynamism and flexibility with explicit prim- itives. The proposed approach consists of a programming model and a corresponding programming language. This paper presents the syntax and formal operational semanticsof Oragent language, and studies a case to demonstrate our approach.展开更多
：An increasing number of computer systems are being viewed in terms of autonomous agents.Most people believe that agent-oriented approach is well suited to design and build complex systems. Yet. todate, little effort...：An increasing number of computer systems are being viewed in terms of autonomous agents.Most people believe that agent-oriented approach is well suited to design and build complex systems. Yet. todate, little effort had been devoted to discuss the advantages of agent-oriented approach as a mainstreamsoftware engineering paradigm. Here both of this issues and the relation between object-oriented and agent-oriented will be argued. we describe an agent-oriented methodology and provide a quote for designing anauction system.展开更多
文摘The dynamic variations in demand patterns and produ ct mix, driven by unpredictable changes in a global market, are placing manufactur ing systems under significant pressure. In order to remain competitive, manu facturing organisations must satisfy demands timely. This implies that companies must increase product varieties, reduce time-to-market, shorten product-life cycles and at the same time maintain good quality and reduce investment costs. Conventional methodologies for planning and control have been found to be inadeq uate in meeting these challenges. Agile manufacturing is the state-of-the-art concept that provides enterprises with the opportunity to react rapidly and cos t-effectively to changes that occur in their environment. Several paradigms suc h as Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS), Bionic Manufacturing Systems (BMS) and Fractal Factory have been developed to enable manufacturing systems achieve agi lity by integrating manufacturing activities into a coordinated framework. Despi te the differences in their origin (HMS from social organisation, BMS from biolo gy and Fractal Factory from Mathematics), these paradigms have overlapping conce pts and one of the most important is hierarchical organisational structure. This paper presents a conceptual hierarchically structured multi-agent architec ture for manufacturing systems’ modelling. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) provide su itable techniques for implementing the above concepts and as a branch of Distrib uted Artificial Intelligence (DAI), have characteristics that have been explored in various applications. Such characteristics include self-organisation, flexi bility, scalability, and robustness. The proposed architecture provides a suit able decision-making framework where each agent represents a node in the hier archic tree of manufacturing systems such as the company as whole, each plant wi thin the company, each cell or line within the plant, each machine in a cell or line. Each agent has the ability to perceive and evaluate changes that occur in the manufacturing environment, interact with other agents in the system in order to reach an optimal decision, and act based on that decision. In other words, agents respond timely to unexpected changes by continuously co-ordinating t heir activities, and allocating manufacturing resources dynamically based on act ual shop-floor situation. The flexibility of this architecture also lies in its ability to accommodate both homogenous and heterogeneous agents, and its capabi lity for the dynamic addition and removal of agents using a conceptual intellige nt communication mechanism similar to the blackboard messaging system. A Bidding -Based Scheme (BBS) would be used to generate and evaluate alternative scenario at run-time. In addition, this architecture can be extended to meet the requir ements of enterprise integration.
文摘Agent-oriented approach is increasingly showing its magic power in a diversity of fields, specifically, ubiquitous computing and smart environment. Meanwhile, it is considered the next creative issue is to interconnect and integrate isolated smart spaces in real world together into a higher level space known as a hyperspace. In this paper, an agent-oriented architecture, which involves the techniques of mobile agents, middleware, and embedded artificial intelligence, is proposed. Detailed implementations describe our efforts on the design of terminal device, user interface, agents, and AI
基金This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grand No. 60496322 and the Chinese Ministry of Education under Grand No. 05JZD720.4001.
文摘Currently, agent-based computing is an active research area, and great efforts have been made towards the agent-oriented programming both from a theoretical and practical view. However, most of them assume that there is no uncertainty in agents＇ mental state and their environment. In other words, under this assumption agent developers are just allowed to specify how his agent acts when the agent is 100% sure about what is true/false. In this paper, this unrealistic assumption is removed and a new agent-oriented probabilistic logic programming language is proposed, which can deal with uncertain information about the world. The programming language is based on a combination of features of probabilistic logic programming and imperative programming.
文摘An increasing number of social computational systems consist of a great amount of autonomous entities and operate in highly dynamic and unpredictable environments. To construct such systems needs to seek high-level abstrac- tion to manage the complexity of the systems and novel mechanism to support their characteristics, i.e., dynamism and flexibility. Agent-oriented programming （AOP） is con- sidered as a potential paradigm for developing such systems by exhibiting a number of characteristics, such as autonomy, flexibility, social ability, etc. However, current researches on AOP mainly focus on the construction of multi-agent system （MAS） with theory and language facilities inspired from arti- ficial intelligence （AI） and distributed AI, seldom considering and integrating the proven principles and practices of pro- gramming and software engineering. Moreover, abstractions and mechanism based on AI are inadequate for developing dynamic and flexible MAS in open environment. This paper proposes a novel AOP approach, namely Oragent, for con- structing and implementing dynamic and flexible systems. From a software engineering perspective, Oragent integrates organizational concepts and mechanism into AOP language, and support the dynamism and flexibility with explicit prim- itives. The proposed approach consists of a programming model and a corresponding programming language. This paper presents the syntax and formal operational semanticsof Oragent language, and studies a case to demonstrate our approach.
基金This paper is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China with grant No.79970 0 3 8
文摘：An increasing number of computer systems are being viewed in terms of autonomous agents.Most people believe that agent-oriented approach is well suited to design and build complex systems. Yet. todate, little effort had been devoted to discuss the advantages of agent-oriented approach as a mainstreamsoftware engineering paradigm. Here both of this issues and the relation between object-oriented and agent-oriented will be argued. we describe an agent-oriented methodology and provide a quote for designing anauction system.
