Collaborative plan exchange: significant reinforcement for contract net based distributed manufacturing systems

Contract net protocol had been popularly employed in distributed manufacturing systems. However, it provides almost no guarantee of robustness and optimization of performance. In this paper a method called collaborative plan exchange (CPE) is brought forward as reinforcement for contract net protocol. CPE adds an information exchange process among resource agents to let them get up-to-the-minute information, arrange coherent action, fulfil manufacturing constraints and collaboratively complete tasks. When a disturbance occurs, CPE can inform influenced agents and form new coherent work scheme. Theoretical analysis and experiments indicate that system robustness and performance are improved significantly.