Research on Collaborative Order Decision-Making Method for Symmetric Participants in Complex Shipbuilding Projects

Abstract

More extensive enterprise cooperation is an effective means to increase the competitiveness of shipbuilding companies in the current distributed manufacturing environment. Most cross-enterprise collaborative processes for shipbuilding projects have been widely concerned. However, the symmetry and cooperativity among the order decision-making process is rarely involved. A key issue for decision makers is to balance the interests of each symmetric participant and realize the consistent decision-making for the order. Existing order decision-making methods in the shipbuilding industry are low efficiency. The aim of this paper is to provide an assistant decision-making method to support effective order decision-making and multi-party cooperation for the multi-wining negotiation objectives. To solve this problem, a collaborative order decision-making framework based on decision support system (DSS) and multi-agent system (MAS) theory is presented, simulating the collaborative order decision-making process, and bridging the order decision-making with production scheduling. Then, a multi-stage negotiation method is provided to solve the distributed and symmetric order decision-making problem, and an illustrative example is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and rationality of the methods. Finally, an application case using a prototype system will be reported as a result.