Price-based negotiation for task assignment in a distributed network manufacturing mode environment

Facing serious challenges and pressures from the demand for customisation as well as the growing trends in globalisation of the economy and market, manufacturing enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, have to transform their traditional manufacturing organisational mode to network-like, dynamic and reconfigurable groups by applying information technology. By using the concept of agile manufacturing, we propose a distributed network manufacturing mode (DNMM). In DNMM, dispersed organisation units are connected by a network, collaborating with others to finish the manufacturing orders promptly for meeting the needs of customers. Each organisational unit is more or less autonomous and has certain capabilities to solve problems independently. The well-known Contract Net Protocol has been widely used to handle temporal constraints and to deal with scheduling conflicts; however, owing to its relative simplicity in coping with complex problems, modifications to it are needed for satisfying various requirements for improving system performance. In this paper, we utilise a market-like mechanism based on price to assign tasks among organisational units in DNMM, propose a model for dynamic task assignment as well as describing the main roles and functions of the model, discuss in detail the price-based negotiation mechanisms, and finally present a simulation experiment implemented in our distributed network manufacturing prototype system.