Manufacturing service negotiation and resource management: a QoS approach

In this paper, we report our research into the concepts, techniques, characterization, and application of new approaches to enabling manufacturing service providers to better manage and deploy manufacturing operations and resources to face up the challenges brought about by the next generation service-oriented manufacturing paradigm. The concept of quality of service (QoS) for manufacturing (MQoS) is introduced, together with a framework within which manufacturing services and service levels can be specified, negotiated, agreed, evaluated and enforced. QoS-aware techniques are then presented that can be adopted for more efficient manufacturing resource negotiation, reservation, monitoring and optimization. With the QoS-based approach, distributed manufacturing resource managers (agents) can quickly negotiate and agree on the service levels and resource commitment required through a process of dynamically evaluating the service levels to be provided against the projected cost of delivering the agreed service.