Research themes

The main research areas regards the following:

- Capacity sharing in network of enterprises. The cooperation mechanisms proposed are supported by the development of Multi Agent Architecture.

The methodologies developed concerns the negotiation protocols and auction for competitive approach. The cooperative approaches are developed

by several methods derived from the game theory as NASH equilibrium, Shapley value and Owen. The proposed methodologies are evaluated by

simulation environment based on opens source tool as the java development kit.

- Capacity expansion in network of enterprises. It is considered a network of enterprises that cooperate sharing capacity. The information derived

from the cooperation is used to decide the capacity investment decision. The tools developed regards the fuzzy logic tool and Monte-carlo simulation.

The combination of the different tools are evaluated by the simulation environment developed by the java development kit.

- Distributed Production Planning. It is considered a network of enterprises that cooperate to distribute the production among them. Several protocols

are proposed to distribute the production among the enterprises of the network. The protocols combine the negotiation mechanism at network level

and genetic algorithm at enterprise level to optimize the production allocation. A simulation environment based on java development kit is developed

to evaluate the methodologies proposed.

- Manufacturing systems scheduling. It is proposed several innovative scheduling approach at operation level of the manufacturing systems.

In particular, it is developed a scheduling approach based on ant colony evaluating when the proposed approach leads to better performance measures.

Several scheduling approaches are developed using Multi Agent methodology in order to obtain an adaptable scheduling approach.

The proposed methodologies are evaluated developing simulation environments using ROCKWELL ARENA software.

- Robust manufacturing system configurations. It is proposed several manufacturing system configurations considering dynamic market conditions.

It is investigated the use of reminder cell in a manufacturing system in order to keep high level of performance when the market conditions change.

It is proposed a dynamic manufacturing cell reconfigurations combining three mathematical models that allow to reconfigure the manufacturing

cells when the market demand fluctuates. The methodologies are evaluate developing simulation environment in ROCKWELL ARENA, java

development kit combined with LINGO solver.

The following figure reassumes the main research areas: