ABSTRACT
Agent technology is widely recognized as a promising paradigm for the next generation of design and manufacturing systems. Researchers have already applied agent technology to concurrent engineering, collaborative engineering design, manufacturing enterprise integration, supply chain management, manufacturing planning, scheduling and control, material handling, and holonic manufacturing systems. The technology is sufficiently mature that some universities have created graduate courses in this area in departments of Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, and Industrial Engineering. Outside of these departments, an increasing number of engineers and researchers wish to learn more about this emerging technology. For background reference, there are relevant texts on AI or DAI such as “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach” (Russell and Norvig, 1995), “Foundations of Distributed Artificial Intelligence” (O’Hare and Jennings, 1996), “Readings in Distributed Artificial Intelligence” (Bond and Gasser, 1988). For agent technology, there are also recent texts such as “Multi-Agent Systems” (Ferber, 1999, the translation of his 1995 work “Les Systèmes Multi-Agents”), “Software Agents” (Bradshaw, 1997), “Readings in Agents” (Huhns and Singh, 1997), “Agent Technology: Foundations, Applications and Markets” (Jennings and Wooldridge, 1998), “Multiagent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence” (Weiss, 1999), as well as more specialized works in the series “Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence” and in numerous conference and workshop proceedings. However, there are no reference books on agent technology for concurrent engineering design and manufacturing describing systematically and synthetically the relevant theories and methods and giving practical information and examples for developing multi-agent systems in this domain. The objective of this book is to fill this gap.
