Performance of Time-Bound Negotiation in Agent-Based Manufacturing Control

Agent-based software technology plays an important role in the manufacturing industry for achieving agility. Shop floor control applications can be designed based on the paradigm of agent negotiation to cope with variabilities and disturbances in the production environment. This often involves the contract net protocol (CNP) and previous research has suggested that the timing parameters of CNP can affect significantly the performance of agent negotiation. This work extends our knowledge in this area of research by considering the performance effects of the combinatorial variations of these parameters in a discrete-event simulation case study. The results provide not only a deeper understanding of the time-bound agent negotiation process, but also insights into the performance fine-tuning of CNP-based control schemes.