Abstract: The networked cooperative manufacture among enterprises can promote their competitive capacity and the first step is to disassemble the project into several sub-projects. There are priority constraints among the sub-projects and their completion must follow a certain time sequence. Here gives a new method to describe the constraints and calculate the exact executing time area of each sub-project. The time sequence of the sub-projects can be described by our defined before relation Rbefore coupled with both sub-relations including serial before relation Rs-before and parallel before relation Rp-before. The backward deducing arithmetic to calculate the executing time areas of the sub-projects is raised. Moreover, the rules to determine the disassembling granularity of the project are proposed. Eventually, the practice proved that the method could effectively solve the time-sequence constraint issue of the sub-projects in the multi-agent based networked cooperative manufacturing system.

Key words: Before relation and its sub-relations, Disassembling granularity, Networked cooperative manufacture, Project disassembly, Time-sequence constraint