TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 2 introduced the characteristics of the PS-Bikes company, an imaginary enterprise that manufactures bicycles. In that chapter, the issues pertinent to making PS-Bikes flexible in processing orders from an e-commerce site through the introduction of an MAS solution were discussed. However, some questions were purposefully left open, especially regarding the possible integration of the new northern plant with the company s older one, the introduction of an agent-based MES in the new plant, and the adoption of an agent-based/holonic S&C system in both production facilities. This section endeavors to answer these questions.
An MAS for workflow management that handles new orders coming from PS-Bikes e-commerce site was defined in Chapter 2; thus, a natural starting point for the integration of the new northern plant in order to exploit its production capacity is to share the workload of the orders received from the Web site with this plant. This choice is likely to be preferred by PS-Bikes executives, who are seeking to replace the consolidated procedures gradually, based on the conventional layered planning system.
To reach this goal, the MAS architecture proposed in the section in Chapter 2 titled from problems to agents at PS-Bikes is replicated in the new northern plant, introducing the three sales, production, and purchase agencies into the plant information system. Then, following the cooperation paradigm discussed in the section on agent-based applications in manufacturing planning and scheduling, coordination between the two separate sets...
