Negotiation mechanisms for capacity allocation in distributed enterprises

The paper proposes an agent based approach for the capacity allocation in distributed enterprises, characterized by complex and articulated organizations and by geographically distributed production capacities contended by many product families. In such a scenario the process of allocating the production capacity to the single customer order is one the major bottlenecks of the production planning activity as far as many organizational decisional levels are involved and market turbulence implies a continuous retuning of the capacity allocation plan. A high grade of reactiveness is needed. Agent based approaches and negotiation models, by decentralizing the decisional control and simplifying the decision itself, make the capacity allocation process enough reactive. Although, when the actors involved in the negotiation have different decisional powers and different knowledge, the problem of decentralization and specifically the design of the negotiation mechanism become very complex. This paper proposes two negotiation models for the capacity allocation process in distributed enterprises. The models, rationalised by using the standard IDEF3 representation, have been tested in the industrial environment of a primary semiconductor company.