TABLE OF CONTENTS In this section, the model of negotiation among scheduling agents is presented. The purpose of negotiation is to reach an agreement about the assignment of operations to machining and assembly equipment and to improve the overall schedule. The model defines a range of strategies and tactics that an agent can deploy to generate new scheduling offers. The model is based on computationally tractable algorithms.
The following assumptions are valid for the model: ( i) there is no deadline for the scheduling decisions to be reported to schedule manager; ( ii) each agent starts decision-making process, as soon as he receives the necessary information from the schedule manager; ( iii) agents report about their decisions to the schedule manager as soon as their decision is made; ( iv) schedule manager announces his decision to the agents as soon as his decision is made.
Before describing the negotiation mechanism the following definitions and notations are introduced:
a j agent j, j=1, , k;
t t ij completion time of the last machining operation on machine i ( i=1, , m) obtained by agent a j ( j=1, , k) at stage t;
T t ij completion time of the last assembly operation on assembly machine i, ( i=1, , q) obtained by agent a j ( j=1, , k
