Fine-tuning negotiation time in multi-agent manufacturing systems

Abstract

Global market competition has put intense pressure on the manufacturing industry to become more agile and responsive to market changes. Multi-agent systems (MAS) provide a decentralised control architecture that can reduce complexity, increase flexibility, and enhance fault tolerance for manufacturing systems. Shop floor control applications can be designed based on the paradigm of agent negotiation. This often involves the contract net protocol (CNP) and previous research has suggested that the timing parameters of CNP can affect significantly the performance of agent negotiation. This chapter discusses the combinatorial variations of these parameters using a discrete-event simulation case study. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.