Research On Automated Service Negotiation Based On Simultaneous Offer In Cloud Manufacturing

With the increasing competition of globalization, the enterprises must focus on their core business and maximize their competitive advantages to seek long-term development. Concerning the business in which they are not professional, they may need the help of manufacturing services and capabilities from other enterprises. Thus resource sharing and business collaboration between enterprises becomes much more significant than ever. With the continuous development of the Internet, networked manufacturing appears. To a certain extent, it achieves automation of transactions, breaks through the geographical space constraints on the scope and manner of business and reduces the cost of enterprise. But some problems, such as fixed service model and inability to implement the allocation and sharing of resources dynamically and so on, still exist in current networked manufacturing domain, which limit its further promotion.The rapid growth of new technologies such as cloud computing and Internet of Things provides a new way to explore service modes in cloud manufacturing. Cloud manufacturing, which is a new networked manufacturing mode, is comings into being. Under the cloud manufacturing mode, various kinds of manufacturing resources and capabilities are encapsulated as services. The users achieve the integrated services in an on-demand way to realize resources sharing and business collaboration.Cloud manufacturing mode needs service trading based on market mechanisms. Traditional market mechanisms for e-commerce such as fixed-pricing and auctions can partly share information and trade electronically. Since cloud manufacturing is under an open and dynamic environments and the character of a service is often decided by multiple attributes, the mechanisms above cannot meet the requirements of multi-attribute based service trading.Negotiation is a flexible way for service trading. During the negotiation process, service providers and consumers express their own demands and preferences through bargaining. With the development of some technologies such as artificial intelligence and agent technology, automated negotiation mode is used generally in service trading. With the background of service trading between manufacturing enterprises, this thesis researches agent-based automated negotiation. The main contributions of the thesis are as follows: We present a service trading framework for cloud manufacturing which supports diversified trading based on agent technology. In service trading, the market plays a key role in the process of matching supply and demand between service provider and consumer. For service negotiation trade, the market also works in the negotiation process. We take full account of this in the proposed negotiation model.We propose a service negotiation model based on simultaneous offer. In this model, the cloud manufacturing platform serves as a third party mediator. Service providers and consumers send their offers to the mediator and then after evaluating these offers, the mediator will make proposals. In this way, the negotiation can be speeded up and both parties don’t need to worry about exposing their private information to their opponent. We used genetic algorithm to generate offer which considers both time and opponent’s behavior to compute concession. The algorithm reflects the adaptive and learning characteristics in multi-agent interaction.Finally, we implement the module of automated negotiation with the above method under the manufacturing information platform. Through theoretical and experimental analysis, the model proposed in this thesis is feasible and can work better than current alternating-offer bilateral negotiation model. Future work is mainly about how to describe detailed service and adjust the negotiation strategy to ensure a win-win solution.