Negotiation mechanisms for capacity allocation in distributed enterprises

Abstract 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 sim…