Modeling manufacturing resources based on agent model

In order to improve the responsiveness to changes and uncertainties around production activity, we should have the integrated methodology which allows us to uniformly model and design the total system including production and planning resource and related information exchanged among resources. We propose the agent model and the modeling methodology. There are two types of the agent in our model. One is a service agents that offers some processing functions. The other is a mobile agent that moves among service agents. A manufacturing resource is modeled as one of the service agents since it provides manufacturing functions. On the other hand, each lot or production instruction information controlling production progress can be model as one of the mobile agents.