A hybrid control architecture and coordination mechanism in virtual manufacturing enterprise

The concept of Virtual Enterprise (VE), a special organization of manufacturing units and enterprises, has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Unlike traditional enterprise, VE is most suitable in production environments that experience frequent changes in product mix. To complete a complex task composed of some sub-tasks, traditional control architecture is not versatile enough to coordinate and schedule multi-site and multi-type resources, especially in resolving resource conflicts during operations. Using hybrid control architecture, VE can execute the effective control on multi-site enterprises to support the rapid response to customer demands. Coordination mechanism running through the total life cycle of VE is applied to coordinating and scheduling the requests from different tasks and resources, which make VE flexible, adaptive and robust. In this paper, the hybrid control architecture based on multi-agent technology that supports the cooperation of enterprises is presented. Coordination mechanism and the corresponding optimal models are discussed. Finally a case study is used as an illustration to present the detailed coordination mechanism.