The impact of cooperation and competition on the performance of flexible decentralized manufacturing networks

DOI

10.1080/18756891.2013.761777How to use a DOI?

Keywords

flexibility, decentralized manufacturing system, multi-agent simulation, contract net protocol, cooperative subcontracting mechanism

Abstract

Due to the mismatch between the order of costumers and the production capacity resulting from demand uncertainty, product shortages or wastes of production capacity occur. In response, the subcontracting of production among the plants occurs to diminish the influence of this mismatch on expected profits. Using a small-and medium-sized firm industrial district, the decentralized decision-making process for flexibility investment is studied using the cooperative subcontracting mechanism based on a contract net protocol and is compared with centralized decision making on the flexibility investment problem. Through simulation, it is concluded that although flexibility can increase the opportunities to obtain additional orders, the distributed decision-making mechanism increases the competition among plants during the bidding process. Plants should tradeoff these two aspects to make decisions about investments in flexibility.

Copyright

© 2017, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - JOUR
AU  - Hu-Song Ding
AU  - Ping He
AU  - Fu-Xiang Wu
AU  - Yan-Hong Sun
PY  - 2013
DA  - 2013/01/02
TI  - The impact of cooperation and competition on the performance of flexible decentralized manufacturing networks
JO  - International Journal of Computational Intelligence Systems
SP  - 174
EP  - 185
VL  - 6
IS  - 1
SN  - 1875-6883
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1080/18756891.2013.761777
DO  - 10.1080/18756891.2013.761777
ID  - Ding2013
ER  -