Integration of process planning and scheduling using mobile-agent based approach in a networked manufacturing environment Vijaya Kumar Manupati a,⇑ , Goran D. Putnik c , Manoj Kumar Tiwari b , Paulo Ávila d , Maria Manuela Cruz-Cunha e a School of Mechanical Engineering, Department of Manufacturing, VIT University, Vellore, Tamil Nadu 632014, India b Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721302, West Bengal, India c Department of Production and Systems Engineering & ALGORITHMI Research Centre, University of Minho, 4800-058 Guimarães, Portugal d CIDEM, School of Engineering, Polytechnic of Porto, Portugal e Polytechnic Institute of Cavado and Ave, Portugal article info Article history: Received 27 November 2014 Received in revised form 14 December 2015 Accepted 22 January 2016 Available online 6 February 2016 Keywords: Mobile-agent Networked manufacturing Ontology Process planning Scheduling abstract Effective and efficient implementation of intelligent and/or recently emerged networked manufacturing systems require an enterprise level integration. The networked manufacturing offers several advantages in the current competitive atmosphere by way to reduce, by shortening manufacturing cycle time and maintaining the production flexibility thereby achieving several feasible process plans. The first step in this direction is to integrate manufacturing functions such as process planning and scheduling for multi-jobs in a network based manufacturing system. It is difficult to determine a proper plan that meets conflicting objectives simultaneously. This paper describes a mobile-agent based negotiation approach to integrate manufacturing functions in a distributed manner; and its fundamental framework and func- tions are presented. Moreover, ontology has been constructed by using the Protégé software which pos- sesses the flexibility to convert knowledge into Extensible Markup Language (XML) schema of Web Ontology Language (OWL) documents. The generated XML schemas have been used to transfer informa- tion throughout the manufacturing network for the intelligent interoperable integration of product data models and manufacturing resources. To validate the feasibility of the proposed approach, an illustrative example along with varied production environments that includes production demand fluctuations is presented and compared the proposed approach performance and its effectiveness with evolutionary algorithm based Hybrid Dynamic-DNA (HD-DNA) algorithm. The results show that the proposed scheme is very effective and reasonably acceptable for integration of manufacturing functions. Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Global competition renders adequate return on investment only to those who can provide innovative and intricate products having high quality, with less process iterations and more cost competi- tiveness. The existing manufacturing systems cannot adequately conform to these requirements because of their deterministic approach to decision-making in an uncertain environment. In order to respond to rapidly changing environment and to obtain high product variety and short product life cycles, a shift of the manufacturing paradigm from deterministic to a dynamic adaptive control of a manufacturing system is indispensable. Several next generation manufacturing systems are emerging, such as the Bio- nic manufacturing system (Okino, 1993; Ueda, 1993), the Fractal factory (Warnecke, 1993), Holonic manufacturing system Valckenaers et al. (1994), and Distributed manufacturing systems (Peklenik & Jerele, 1992), that are adaptable to environmental changes, particularly when market demands cause frequent turbu- lent fluctuations. Over the past few years much research and study (Rosenau, 1996; Wang, 1997; Wilde & Briscoe, 2011), have proven that distributed manufacturing system enables the enterprises to enhance the flexibility and re-configurability for achieving better quality and cost effective manufacturing strategies. Recently emerged networked manufacturing or network based manufactur- ing paradigm is one such distributed manufacturing system which can support the above mentioned requirements and their functionalities. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cie.2016.01.017 0360-8352/Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. Mobile: +91 9775627564. E-mail addresses: manupativijay@gmail.com, manupati.vijay@vit.ac.in (V.K. Manupati), putnikgd@dps.uminho.pt (G.D. Putnik), mkt09@hotmail.com (M.K. Tiwari), patg@math.uminho.pt (P. Ávila), mcunha@ipca.pt (M.M. Cruz-Cunha). Computers & Industrial Engineering 94 (2016) 63–73 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Computers & Industrial Engineering journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/caie