An Adaptive Negotiation Framework for Agent Based Dynamic Manufacturing Scheduling

Manufacturing scheduling problems, especially in a dynamic, uncertain environment, belong to the NP-hard class. Agent based approach has been considered as a promising solution to these types of problems. However, it brings in another challenge which is how to make those costly negotiation processes among agents effective. This paper addresses this problem by proposing an Adaptive Negotiation Framework which models the dynamic nature of agent based manufacturing scheduling at negotiation level explicitly. The main contributions of this paper include: (1) an Agent-Based Adaptive Negotiation Framework for manufacturing scheduling, (2) selection heuristics of multiple economically inspired negotiation models, (3) the integration of adaptive negotiation heuristics, economic models and the Coordinated Intelligent Rational agent architecture.