Routing and dispatching of multiple mobile agents in integratedenterprises

Agent-based technology provides a natural way to design and implement enterprise collaboration. We model the integrated manufacturing enterprise as a directed graph and reduce the problem of enhancing the efficiency of mobile agents to the problem of finding resource-constrained extremal paths in the graph. We suggest a general two-stage solution method combining routing and dispatching, which extends an earlier computational scheme in the literature for the constrained path problems. The new method essentially improves on several earlier algorithms and provides a new approach for constructing a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme(FPTAS) for the multi-agent constrained path problem.