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

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.

Application of Artificial Capital Market in Task Allocation in Multi-robot Foraging

“…At this point, employing of distributed paradigm is necessary for tasks those cannot be completed by a single robot 44 . Nevertheless, even when the task can be completed by a single robot, distributed approach is still beneficial as it may boost up efficiency, speed, flexibility and robustness of the system [45][46] . Distributed solutions of the problem as well as parallel computations would improve the efficiency and flexibility where the flexibility is related to novel and different solutions [46][47][48][49] .…”