AN AGENT-BASED COOPERATIVE MECHANISM FOR INTEGRATED PRODUCTION AND TRANSPORTATION PLANNING

This paper presents a decentralized cooperative economic scheduling mechanism for a supply chain environment. For this purpose, we design autonomous agents that minimize the production or transportation costs and outsourcing costs incurred by the external execution of a task. The decentralized cooperative scheduling approach comprises two parts: the individual optimization an agent\u27s local schedule and the cooperative contract optimization, either by outsourcing the task or by (re-)contracting the release time and due time with the contract partners aiming to maximize their total profits. A negotiation mechanism based on trust accounts is employed to protect the agents against systematic exploitation by their partners