An agent-based approach for integrating manufacturing operations

To remain competitive in today's global market, manufacturing organisations must be able to respond to unpredictable changes that occur in the market rapidly and cost-effectively. To facilitate such responsiveness, this paper presents an agent-based approach that would enable manufacturers to achieve optimised utilisation of resources within their existing manufacturing systems' structures and constraints while simultaneously considering systems' reconfiguration and restructure options to accommodate changing demand distributions and product mix. The approach is based on an integrated decision platform on which planning and control decisions can be considered concurrently with system reconfiguration/restructure decisions.