Research on the Cooperative Behavior in Cloud Manufacturing

Abstract

With the development of information and network technology, a new type of manufacturing paradigm Cloud Manufacturing (CMg) is emerged. In the CMg environment, geographically distributed various manufacturing resources (MgSs) and manufacturing capabilities managed by different companies are encapsulated as different manufacturing services under the support of cloud computing, Internet of Things and virtualization technologies. CMg can provide on-demand MgSs for the manufacturing tasks (MgTs) of different customers in the network manufacturing environment. One MgT usually needs different MgSs owned by different companies to form a coalition for working together to finish it. However, being an autonomous entity, each MgS generally makes decisions in light of its own interests, so it is difficult to maximize the collective interests of the coalition. The cooperation among the MgSs in the same coalition is an effective way to maximize the collective interests. Hence, how to motivate MgSs to cooperate mutually is been paid more attention in cloud manufacturing environment. In the paper, the evolutionary game theory and the learning automaton are employed to model the decision-making process of MgSs. And a punishment mechanism is introduced to incentivize the mutual cooperation of MgSs. Furthermore, the Blockchain as a data storage structure is adopted to record the behaviors of the MgSs to prevent from falsifying their feedback. At last, the agent-based modeling is used to model and simulate the process of MgSs working together. The simulating results reveal that the punishment mechanism is effective in promoting the cooperation among MgSs from various perspectives.