Advances in e-manufacturing: foundations of market-based collaborative planning and control of distributed multiple product development projects

Abstract e-Manufacturing is becoming popular with the increased use of the internet. Due the widespread availability of the Internet large-scale distributed projects in manufacturing are becoming popular. The authors present a distributed, collaborative, and adaptive planning and control approach for distributed multiple product development projects (DMPDPs), which is a representative project environment in modern e-enterprises. In DMPDP environment, multiple project groups share and compete for limited resources to achieve their own goals. On the other hand, the shared resource divisions intent to efficiently utilize their resources. It is suggested that this kind of situation can be well modeled and efficiently solved by using two novel approaches: multiagent based information infrastructure and market-based control mechanism. In this paper, the authors (i) formalize the DMPDP planning and control problem, and (ii) propose a market-based negotiation mechanism called unified-sequential market-clearing (U-SMC) protocol. The theoretical foundations of this novel concept are dealt with.