A Partner Selection Approach for Virtual Enterprise in Manufacturing Grid

A manufacturing grid (MG) would be created for low-cost and high productivity productions through controlled resource sharing across enterprises. Virtual enterprise(VE) creates a win-win situation for enterprises to make well use of their competitive resources. It will be the organizational form of MG. However, the traditional approaches of virtual enterprise partner selection can not meet the requirements of the manufacturing grid. A new partner selection framework is presented based on web services and Agent technology. By applying multi-attribute utility theory(MAUT), a new method of partner selection for manufacturing grid is proposed. At the same time, two evaluation indexes, utility-expense ratio and cost-utility ratio, are put forward, which can be adopted by manager and partners respectively to evaluate each other to maximize their profits with incomplete information. Finally, an illustrative example is given to validate the approach´s availability.