Distributed decision protocols for optimal demand and capacity sharing by collaborating enterprises

This research is motivated by the arbitrary nature of demand and capacity patterns in manufacturing enterprises and the ability to overcome such uncertainties by forming a Collaborative Network of enterprises (CN). Cooperative Production Switchover Coordination (CPSC) and Demand and Capacity Sharing Protocols (DCSP) have been designed to enhance the benefits of enterprise cooperation and collaboration. Affiliation/Dissociation (A/D) decisions in the CN have been also studied when an enterprise or the CN needs to evaluate the anticipated reward of enterprise collaboration. Under the assumptions used in this research, experimental results and analyses indicate that the CPSC and DCSP increase the acceptance rate of customer orders, capacity utilization rate, and/or total profit by over 10-50% at different designs of experiments. The results also indicate that the partial collaboration protocol increases CN profitability by up to 20%, compared to the complete collaboration protocol. On the other hand, the complete collaboration protocol increases the utilization of collaborating capacities by over 10%, compared to the partial collaboration protocol. It implies that a calculated level of enterprise collaboration is required to maximize the performance of the CN. Another significant finding is that a single enterprise always prefers to affiliate with the CN in terms of demand fulfillment rate and total profit. The CN should, however, dissociate from a particular member enterprise of the CN when this enterprise\u27s mean demand (or capacity) is at least a value that can be calculated relative to the mean demand (or capacity) of all the other collaborating enterprises