Abstract
Due to rapid changes of markets and pressures of competitions, industries are gradually adopting their production way to support more diversity of customer's needs. This paper deals with an agent-based architecture of the integrated systems for the process planning and the production control in the manufacturing systems. In consideration of alternative manufacturing processes and machine tools, the process plans and the schedules of the manufacturing resources are generated dynamically and incrementally. Such an adaptable process planning system is becoming increasingly important for the manufacturing enterprise. We initiatively combine the process plan networks and the heuristic search algorithms with the negotiation protocol to generate suitable process plans in the dynamic manufacturing environment.
