Decentralised Resource Allocation Planning through Negotiation

Abstract

This paper presents a multi-agent model for resouree aIloeation planning in a manufaeturing environment. This model eonsiders the temporal and synehronism aspeets involved in the aIloeation proeess. The main eontributions ofthis work are: (i) the definition of a formal strategy for resouree aIloeation supported through a multi-agent system that would be able to reduee the eomplexity of the model eonsidering real-time events that potentially affeet the aIloeation, (ii) the definition of a hierarehieal multi-agent arehiteeture with eapaeity to support this strategy.

Multi-agent systems in production planning and control: an overview

“…Heterarchical 48 Baker (1992), Fox et al (1993), Lin and Solberg (1994), Daouas et al (1995), Saad et al (1995), Choi and Park (1997), Tharumarajah and Bemelman (1997), Fraile et al (1999), Gowdy and Rizzi (1999), Krothapalli and Deshmukh (1999), Heterarchical with coordinators 26 Maturana and Norrie (1995), Frost and Cutkosky (1996), Shehory and Kraus (1998), Sauter and Parunak (1999), Sun et al (1999) Hierarchical 4 Keilmann and Conen (1996), Golfarelli and Maio (1997), Bastos and Oliveira (1998) Modified hierarchical 12 Fisher et al (1993), Park et al (1994), Kouiss and Pierreval (1997) Holonic 10 Deen (1994), Biswas et al (1995), Kanchanasevee and Biswas (1997), Zhang and Norrie (1999) 112 M. Caridi and S. Cavalieri Table 4 reports the level of diffusion of the two main communications paradigms (i.e. message passing and blackboard) being adopted in the reviewed works.…”

“…As far the other application domains are concerned, most of the MAS remain at a 'modelled' stage (Deen 1994, Golfarelli and Maio 1997, Swaminathan et al 1998, Bastos and Oliveira 1998 or 'emulated' stage (Lin and Solberg 1994, Heikkila et al 1997, Kouiss and Pierreval 1997, Papaioannou and Edwards 1998, Baker et al 2001 or 'prototype' stage (Balasubramanian and Norrie 1996, Hollis and Quaid 1995, Sprumont and Muller 1997, Valckenaers et al 1997, Barbuceanu et al 1999.…”

“…Applications of message passing and contract net protocol can be found in Lin and Solberg (1994), the market driven system by Baker (1992), the distributed resource allocation by Bastos and Oliveira (1998), the holonic manufacturing system by Kanchanasevee and Biswas (1997).…”

“…The surveyed literature suggests that the MAS models that are operatively utilized by a company ('Production' column in Table 5) or have been translated into a commercial product ('Product' column in Table 5) are few, Baker (1992), Lin and Solberg (1994), Saad et al (1995), Kanchanasevee and Biswas (1997), Bastos and Oliveira (1998) Liu and Sycara (1996), Vidal (1998), Fraile et al (1999), Sadeh et al (1999) whereas most of the applications are at an emulated stage. Notice that the most mature applications ('product' stage) apply to scheduling and monitoring: in particular, they apply to the scheduling of continuous processes (GM paint shop, and paper and steel mill, in Parunak (1998)) and to transfer lines monitoring (Zone Logic, in Parunak 1998).…”

“…An example of this type of architecture is provided by the multi-agent system for planning resources allocation in a manufacturing environment, proposed by Bastos and Oliveira (1998). Keilmann and Conen (1996) present an hierarchical architecture, where each agent task is decomposed in tasks of lower level agents.…”