EFFECTS OF NEGOTIATION MECHANISMS ON PERFORMANCE OF AGENT BASED MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS

This paper proposes new inter-agent negotiation mechanisms for improving the performance of agent based or decentralized manufacturing systems. The focus of this paper is on demonstrating efficiency of different negotiation and collaboration schemes between agents of the same class (parts, machines, etc) and inter-class negotiations using currency metrics. The coop¬eration and negotiation protocols are modeled using the Swarm multi-agent simulation platform. We demonstrate the robustness of the proposed schemes, and compare them with hierarchical scheduling systems.