Production/maintenance cooperative scheduling using multi-agents and fuzzy logic

Within companies, production is directly concerned with the manufacturing schedule, but other services like sales, maintenance, purchasing or workforce management should also have an influence on this schedule. These services often have together a hierarchical relationship, i.e. the leading function (most of the time sales or production) generates constraints defining the framework within which the other functions have to satisfy their own objectives. We show how the multi-agent paradigm, often used in scheduling for its ability to distribute decision-making, can also provide a framework for making several functions cooperate in the schedule performance. Production and maintenance have been chosen as an example: having common resources (the machines), their activities are actually often conflicting. We show how to use a fuzzy logic in order to model the temporal degrees of freedom of the two functions, and show that this approach may allow one to obtain a schedule that provides a better compromise between the satisfaction of the respective objectives of the two functions

KEMNAD: A Knowledge Engineering Methodology for Negotiating Agent Development

Automated negotiation is widely applied in various domains. However, the development of such systems is a complex knowledge and software engineering task. So, a methodology there will be helpful. Unfortunately, none of existing methodologies can offer sufficient, detailed support for such system development. To remove this limitation, this paper develops a new methodology made up of: (1) a generic framework (architectural pattern) for the main task, and (2) a library of modular and reusable design pattern (templates) of subtasks. Thus, it is much easier to build a negotiating agent by assembling these standardised components rather than reinventing the wheel each time. Moreover, since these patterns are identified from a wide variety of existing negotiating agents(especially high impact ones), they can also improve the quality of the final systems developed. In addition, our methodology reveals what types of domain knowledge need to be input into the negotiating agents. This in turn provides a basis for developing techniques to acquire the domain knowledge from human users. This is important because negotiation agents act faithfully on the behalf of their human users and thus the relevant domain knowledge must be acquired from the human users. Finally, our methodology is validated with one high impact system

Using Similarity Criteria to Make Negotiation Trade-Offs

This paper addresses the issues involved in software agents making trade-offs during automated negotiations in which they have information uncertainty and resource limitations. In particular, the importance of being able to make trade-offs in real-world applications is highlighted and a novel algorithm for performing trade-offs for multi-dimensional goods is developed. The algorithm uses the notion of fuzzy similarity in order to find negotiation solutions that are beneficial to both parties. Empirical results indicate the benefits and effectiveness of the trade-off algorithm in a range of negotiation situations

Automated Negotiation for Provisioning Virtual Private Networks Using FIPA-Compliant Agents

This paper describes the design and implementation of negotiating agents for the task of provisioning virtual private networks. The agents and their interactions comply with the FIPA specification and they are implemented using the FIPA-OS agent framework. Particular attention is focused on the design and implementation of the negotiation algorithms

Automated Purchase Negotiations in a Dynamic Electronic Marketplace

Nowadays, there is a surge of B2C and B2B e-commerce operated\ud on the Internet. However, many of these systems are often nothing\ud more than electronic product or service catalogues. Against this background,\ud it is argued that new generation systems based on automatic\ud negotiation will emerge. This paper covers a particular kind of automatic\ud negotiation systems, where a number of participants in a mobile\ud dynamic electronic marketplace automatically negotiate the purchase of\ud products or services, by means of multiple automated one-to-one bargainings.\ud In a dynamic e-marketplace, the number of buyers and sellers\ud and their preferences may change over time. By mobile we mean that\ud buyers in a commercial area may initiate simultaneous negotiations with\ud several sellers using portable devices like cell phones, laptops or personal\ud digital assistants, so these negotiations do not require participants to be\ud colocated in space. We will show how an expressive approach to fuzzy\ud constraint based agent purchase negotiations in competitive trading environments,\ud is ideally suited to work on these kind of e-marketplaces. An\ud example of mobile e-marketplace, and a comparison between an expressive\ud and an inexpressive approach will be presented to show the efficiency\ud of the proposed solution

Strategies for offer generation and relaxation in fuzzy constraint-based negotiation models

Ministerio de Educación y Cienci

A distributed multi-agent framework for shared resources scheduling

Nowadays, manufacturers have to share some of their resources with partners due to the competitive economic environment. The management of the availability periods of shared resources causes a problem because it is achieved by the scheduling systems which assume a local environment where all resources are on the same site. Therefore, distributed scheduling with shared resources is an important research topic in recent years. In this communication, we introduce the architecture and behavior of DSCEP framework (distributed, supervisor, customer, environment, and producer) under shared resources situation with disturbances. We are using a simple example of manufacturing system to illustrate the ability of DSCEP framework to solve the shared resources scheduling problem in complex systems