Performance Evaluation of an Auction-Based Job Allocation Model for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

Abstract

This paper extends the application scope of a previously developed auction-based shop floor control model to the enterprise level and evaluates its performance for the coordination and collaboration of spatially distributed Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). The model uses the contract net protocol to facilitate the negotiation process among SMEs and consists of two main components: task proposal formulation and bid formulation. An agent-based simulation environment is developed in ProModel to evaluate the impact of two negotiation factors and due date slack of tasks on tardiness, earliness and absolute due date deviation of tasks. A mixed-level factorial Design of Experiments (DOE) is carried out by considering different levels of α, β and K, and the results of the simulation study are analysed using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) in Minitab. This study shows that the auction-based model is effective for the task allocation among SMEs, yet it is necessary to fine-tune the negotiation factors based on the due-date-related performance measures.

Department(s)

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering

Second Department

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Keywords and Phrases

Auction Models; Distributed Decision Making; Negotiation; Networked SMEs; Performance Evaluation; Small and Medium Enterprises; Virtual Enterprises

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2006 Inderscience, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 2006

Link to Full Text

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