A market-like coordination for mass customization manufacturing

Mass Customization aims at producing customized products to meet individual customer's needs with mass production efficiency. This new mode of manufacturing introduces a different set of requirements an system control and scheduling, Pie investigate a coordination system far Mass Customization Manufacturing with the construct of intelligent agents in a market-like environment as an overall system design concept. There are two main types of intelligent agents, namely, job agents are tasks to be processed and resource agents refered as the resources required for completing the tasks in mass customization manufacturing systems. In a market,job and resource agents act as buyers and sellers of allocations, their budget and cost calculations reflect the organizational environment of the scheduling process. Price mechanism is a distinct feature of our system, based on micro-economics theories, the price serves as an invisible hand to guide the negotiation to improve system performance. A market-model and a simple example are described.