Developing an agent-based PDM/ERP collaboration system

Among the well-known enterprise application software modules, product data management (PDM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) have played major roles in the design and production departments respectively. Among those, PDM helps design engineers to manage the product data and product development process, and ERP acts as the main tool for order, production and inventory related processes. There are a few duplicated functions among these systems such as BOM management. However, very few works addressed building a bridge among the systems. On the other hand, an agent-based approach has been applied in the collaboration of shop floor equipment for some time. Basically, each agent acts like a machine controller that can take charge of the respective equipment and communicate with other agents as well. This research applies similar concepts to bridge the gaps between PDM and ERP systems and to support the collaboration activities of the two systems. A three-stage framework was proposed to develop the agent-based collaboration system. In the concept stage, the modelling tools such as VAD and eEPC were used to capture collaboration requirements between PDM and ERP. In the design stage, a UML-based analysing method MaSE was used to develop the agent-based system. Also, an agent development tool ZEUS was used to generate agent code. Finally, in the implementation stage, a PDM/ERP collaboration system was developed to support the designer in making decisions about the replacement parts requirement analysis.