Coordinating Societies of Research Agents IMS Experience

Abstract

Architectures for intelligent manufacturing systems as societies of coordinating agents have become a major research theme in the last decade. At the same time research activities on intelligent manufacturing systems have increasingly involved international collaboration and the coordination of societies of human research agents worldwide. The distributed agent coordination models and technologies being developed to manage manufacturing are also applicable to the management of distributed collaborative research. The international Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) research program is an attempt to systematize and make operational worldwide knowledge of advanced manufacturing systems as a basis for new paradigms. This article gives an overview of the IMS objectives, the six test cases to date, and the proposed future research activities. It describes the IMS GNOSIS test case, concerned with knowledge systematization to support the full manufacturing life cycle, and illustrates the support systems developed to coordinate GNOSIS. It concludes with a discussion of the development of models and support systems for the complex sociotechnical systems involved in international collaborative research.