An approach to partner selection in agile manufacturing

It is believed that agile manufacturing is the twenty-first century manufacturing enterprise strategy and should be realized by agile virtual enterprise (AVE) which is dynamically configured for the manufacturing of one or more products. Agile manufacturing creates a significant challenge for the partner selection in configuring an AVE. This paper presents a brief introduction to the task decomposition for the manufacturing of a product in multisite environment. A bidding process should be carried out for each task so as to get the information necessary for the configuration of AVE. To minimize the manufacturing cost, an integer programming (IP) formulation is presented for the partner selection problem. The IP formulation is then transformed into a graph-theoretical formulation by taking the advantage of the precedence relationship between the tasks. The graph obtained turns out to be a directed multipartite graph. Based on the graph-theoretical formulation, an efficient solution algorithm is proposed for the problem. It is shown that the algorithm is polynomial bounded. Therefore, it is applicable to large practical problems.