Modeling of service agents for simulation in cloud manufacturing

Cloud Manufacturing is a paradigm of intelligent manufacturing system with information opening, resource sharing, and diversified services. In order to research the issues in cloud manufacturing, such as behaviors of a service provider and service consumer, matching of service, dynamic change of resource, verification of business model, scheduling of service and evolution of service network, cloud manufacturing simulation platform is widely applied. However, the method of simulation-based on agent or rule lacks to represent the characteristics of service in cloud manufacturing. This paper presents a method of integrating the service and agent to form a service agent. The service agent integrates intelligence to the service in cloud manufacturing so that it can trade autonomously and adapt itself to the environment. A simulation case of production takt is presented in the rear of the paper. It shows that the conceptual model of the service agent and the communication architecture of the service agent can build the service agent model, which can support the cloud manufacturing simulation platform.