Development of a framework for E-Manufacturing

This thesis enlightens some of the key issues involved in developing real schedule generation architecture in E-manufacturing environment. The high cost and long cycle time of development of shop floor control systems accompanied by the lack of robust system integration capabilities are some of the major deterrent in the development of the underlying architecture.In this thesis,a robust framework has been conceptualized,which is capable of providing flexibility to the system, communicating among various entities and making intelligent decisions. Owing to the fast communication, distributed control and autonomous character, agent-oriented architecture has been preferred here to address the scheduling problem in E- manufacturing. Further, an integer programming based model has been formulated for determining the optimal part type sequence from the part type pool with dual objectives namely, minimizing the makespan and increasing the system throughput. The proposed auction-based heuristic to allocate the operation on machines, supported by agent technology appears to be a good formalism to resolve a complex problem in e-manufacturing environment.