Research On Production Planning Model And Task Allocation In Supply Chains Of Allied Enterprises

In line with the rapid development of information technology, the manufacturing enterprises are facing increasingly fierce global competition.In order to maintain core competencies, more and more enterprises have abandoned their traditional business model. Now they intend to search for worldwide outstanding suppliers and distributors to establish good partnerships and eventually form the supply chain based long-term strategy alliances. However, enterprises in the alliance are distributed worldwide and have different resources and goals, which make the old production planning method unable to meet the demands of supply chain based production planning. Originated in the field of Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Multi-Agent System (MAS) is characterized by distribution, dynamic, autonomy and coordination, so it can be a very good simulation of supply chain network in enterprise alliance. Therefore, bringing the Agent technology into supply chain management can provide effective solution to relevant issues in this field.In this paper, at first, the effect of supply chain management on production planning method is analyzed. Then the Agent technology is introduced into supply chain management and multi-Agent based supply chain model is proposed. What's more, Agent-based multi-level production planning model for allied enterprise is constructed and a detailed study of the task allocation module is conducted. Finally, a multi-Agent system is created to simulate the simple task allocation process.Production planning is very important to the supply chain management for allied enterprise. In this paper, all enterprises in the network are abstracted as Agent nodes by functional or physical encapsulation technology and the Agent-based production planning model is divided into three layers, the overall production planning, the main production planning in enterprises and the shop floor scheduling in workshop. The production plan is produced through the collaboration of Agents, which will break through the limitations of traditional production planning methods and realize the enterprise collaboration more flexibly. The allocation of production tasks plays a significant role in production planning; it is one of the important issues in current enterprise collaboration. In this paper, a tender-bid based task allocation model is put forward. The study is focused on the interaction protocol and negotiation algorithm between tender and bidder in task allocation process. The multi-round contract net protocol with time constraints is brought forward. Furthermore, negotiation algorithms, not only for the negotiation between tender and bidder, but also for the multilateral negotiation among bidders, are put forward. All negotiation algorithms are described in detail and are verified by numerical examples. Finally, the multi-Agent task allocation system is created on Java Agent Development Framework (JADE) platform. Experiments are designed to simulate the task allocation process and the experimental results show that tasks are allocated successfully.