An application of artificial intelligence to the implementation of Virtual Automobile Manufacturing Enterprise

In this paper, we present an application of Artificial Intelligence to the implementation of Virtual Automobile Manufacturing Enterprise. We provide a multi autonomous agent based framework. Our agent based architecture leads to flexible design of a spectrum of virtual enterprises by distributing computation and by providing a unified interface to data and programs. Autonomous agents are intelligent enough and provide autonomy, simplicity of communication, computation, and a well developed semantics. The steps of design and implementation are discussed in depth, in particular an ontology, the agent model, and interaction pattern between agents are given. We have developed mechanisms for coordination between agents using a language, which we call Virtual Enterprise Modeling Language (VEML). VEML is a dialect of Java and includes Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language (KQML) primitives. We have implemented a multi autonomous agent based system, which we call VE System. VE System provides application programmers with potential to globally develop different kinds of VEs based on their requirements and applications. We provide case study of automobile manufacturing enterprise and demonstrate efficacy of our system by discussing its salient features.