Abstract
The distributed multi-level uncapacitated lot-sizing problem is a group decision problem which has to be solved by a set of self-interested and autonomous agents. The agents represent independent companies which have to agree on a joint production plan in a supply chain context. In order to solve the problem we extend a negotiation-based simulated annealing approach introduced by Homberger by a part-way reset procedure. The part-way reset procedure allows a negotiation based search which reaches a deadlock to continue with a different contract proposal and thereby offers a possibility of overcoming disagreements between agents more easily. A benchmark study shows that the approach is competitive on set of 80 medium sized instances from the literature in terms of solution quality, in particular 47 new best-known solutions were computed.
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Ziebuhr, M., Buer, T., Kopfer, H. (2013). Agent-Negotiation of Lot-Sizing Contracts by Simulated Annealing with Part-Way Resets. In: Klusch, M., Thimm, M., Paprzycki, M. (eds) Multiagent System Technologies. MATES 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8076. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40776-5_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40776-5_16
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