Distributed collaborative project management throughout product lifecycle for tooling industry

Tooling production is one of the key processes in sheet metal production, where sheet metal production, tooling project scheduling, tooling design and manufacturing are geographically distributed in various locations. Traditional ERP systems cannot address the dynamic requirements in tooling project scheduling and management. Such dynamic requirements include right decision-making through effective collaboration, rapid response to frequent engineering changes and the utilization of expert's tacit knowledge. These dynamic requirements are becoming much more important factors for the success of tooling production. To address such needs, a multi-agent based tooling production management framework is developed in this paper. Such a framework can effectively integrate distributed manufacturing functions, utilize and retain human expert's knowledge, rapidly respond to the engineering change and efficiently perform collaboration throughout the product lifecycle. The system developed based on such a framework can effectively help tooling project managers to generate optimal project schedule, make effective decisions for frequent engineering changes, balance distributed manufacturing capacities, and thus quickly respond to dynamic market requirements. A working prototype system based on this framework has been developed and tested in real application at a tooling manufacturing company.