There is a growing recognition that current manufacturing enterprises must be agile, and the use of virtual enterprise (VE) is becoming increasingly prevalent in recent years. It is a very important and difficult activity in forming a virtual enterprise to select appropriate business partners, because each enterprise considers not only pursuing its profit but also sharing the risk to join the virtual enterprise. At first we propose a VE coalition algorithm based on multi-agent paradigm. Then we develop a computer simulation model to evaluate the proposed method by forming a virtual enterprise through multiple negotiations amongst several potential members in the negotiation domain. Finally, we clarify the coalition dynamism with the negotiation process. The effectiveness of the proposed concept in the agile manufacturing is discussed with several simulation experiments.
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