The Agent.Enterprise Multi-Multi-Agent System

This paper presents the development of the Agent.Enterprise system, which consists of five multi-agent systems from the manufacturing logistics domain. Consequently, the development process has to take the distributed structure of the involved projects into account. The maturity of the technical foundations for multi-agent systems and the support by development tools, infrastructure services and development methods leads to an increasing number of existing multi-agent systems and entails the need to couple them into large multi-multi-agent systems. The Agent.Enterprise development process combines aspects from established agent-oriented development with new concepts designed to interlink multiagent systems. The structure of the coupled multi-agent systems is designed to inherently meet the requirements of distributed supply chains where information for integrated production planning and control is not available within the whole supply chain. This functionality is an integral part of the Agent.Enterprise System. As a consequence, the system is able to handle severe disturbances at supplier sites while dealing with highly customized and complex products.