Additive manufacturing cloud based on multi agent systems and rule inference

In providing a 3D printing cloud manufacturing services, manufacturing capability representation and automatic management of manufacturing resources are challenging problems. In this paper, collaboration architecture of peer self-managed node is proposed to deal with these issues. Each isomorphism self-managed node accesses heterogeneous manufacturing resources, and builds a dynamic and scalable virtual additive manufacturing cloud through the collaboration between the nodes. All the additive manufacturing resources were described by ontology method, and also added some management rules through setting the using conditions. The whole distributed system is managed by the rules as an internal rule engine supports rule conversion and conflict resolution. The formed additive manufacturing cloud can provide convenient and self-management 3D printing services.