Design of negotiation protocols for multi-agent manufacturing systems

This paper proposes new inter-agent and intra-agent negotiation mechanisms for improving the performance of multi-agent or decentralized manufacturing systems. The overall performance of this system depends on the effective interactions between agents. This research presents methods which would permit cooperation and multi-stage interactions among agents. Agents may collaborate or pre-empt other agents based on the available currency and task criticality. The objective of this research is to demonstrate the efficiency of different negotiation and collaboration schemes between agents of the same class (parts, machines, etc), and inter-class negotiations using currency metrics and pre-emption. The proposed negotiation schemes are implemented using the Swarm simulation platform.