Trust-based resource sharing mechanism in distributed manufacturing

Abstract

Manufacturing has moved from local towards global economy in the past decades enabling new paradigms to come into practice, such as distributed manufacturing which aims at increasing companies' flexibility with a decentralized system consisting of autonomous entities. In the paper, a distributed collaboration framework of manufacturing agents is introduced, where the members with resource shortages can request resources from others, divide requests among multiple agents, reorganize their production to be able to complete a request and cancel an undertaken task if needed. In a collaboration framework, it is essential to have a commitment to the promises: if participants cannot count on these commitments, the framework's efficiency may decrease. So as to motivate agents to keep their promises and to enable differentiating between reliable and nonreliable partners, here agents consider trustfulness during the selection from resource offering agents' proposals and make decisions considering subjective trust and public reputation values, which are computed based on successfulness of task performing and meeting due dates. In the paper, the impact of the proposed mechanism is investigated with multi-agent simulation. It is shown that considering trustfulness improves the overall system performance; and the improvement depends on the number of participants and the federation's load.

A Secure Multi-Agent-Based Decision Model Using a Consensus Mechanism for Intelligent Manufacturing Tasks

“…Second, the proposed consensus algorithm is included in the processes of resource division based on multi-agent systems [8]. Many of the proposed solutions in this field use blockchain technology [9], where we can apply the proposed consensus as each agent is a user participating in changing the content of the blockchain.…”

Cooperation platform for distributed manufacturing

“…The problem of distributed manufacturing (DM) or production cooperation management within dynamic network forms has recently been undertaken by a considerable number of research and industrial groups. For example, some results of DM projects have been described for cluster network systems (Akoorie & Ding, 2009;Liu et al, 2017), additive manufacturing in car industry (Durão et al, 2016), metal industry (Gąbka & Susz, 2016), administration in networked headquarters industrial environments (Moghaddam et al, 2016), and sharing DM capacities in a crowdsourced way (Szaller et al, 2020a;Szaller et al, 2020b). Unfortunately, the research and implementation projects to be found in DM or distributed production (DP) management research bibliography and industrial reports basically do not have advanced (i.e.…”

Platform and direct exchange-based mechanisms for resource sharing in distributed manufacturing: a comparison

“…It is essential that resource sharing organizations should be encouraged to keep their promises and to have commitments to their plans and goals. Trusting in each other's promises is one of the main pillars of collaboration, which also helps to increase the service level of the participants and to reduce risks [9] [10]. Nevertheless, computational models applying trustfulness in decision-making are mainly used only in computer technology and online commerce [11].…”

“…In the first reference model -presented in [9], referred to as "Model A" -participants communicate and coordinate their actions directly with each other: they are sending resource requests to all the other organizations who are part of the federation. When receiving a request, all the participants being able to complete the request are applying for the given job and send offers to the requester.…”