Narrow Results

When dealing with massive amounts of primarily read-only data, significant improvements can be made over distributed DBMS for making these data available to a large network. This paper outlines some methods for heuristic query routing and cooperative caching which manage read-only replicas of data in a fully distributed manner on a network of arbitrary topology. These methods insure that query throughout increases steadily as nodes are added to the network while maintaining good response time. The resulting system is capable of providing automatic resource discovery and information retrieval over a wide area network without relying on resource directories.

The centralized planning and control that has defined the traditional information processing structure of manufacturing systems is no longer suited to the current rapidly changing manufacturing environment. For efficient use of manufacturing resources and increased flexibility, it is necessary to migrate to a distributed information processing system in which individual entities can work cooperatively towards overall system goals. The next generation of manufacturing systems requires such an information technology framework to integrate the system components and activities into a larger collaborative enterprise. This paper describes a multi-agent approach to concurrent design, manufacturability analysis, process planning, routing and scheduling. A heterogeneous multi-agent concurrent engineering system consisting of multiple feature-based design sub-systems, multiple simulated shop-floor resource groups, a supervisory control interface and the coordination mechanisms for multi-agent cooperation, has been developed. The architecture of this distributed system and the associated implementation issues are discussed.