The Effect of Relationship Structures on Cooperative Behaviors in a Cloud Manufacturing Environment

Abstract

With the advent and swift development of advanced network and information technology, various advanced manufacturing paradigms are rapidly emerged. A new kind of service-oriented network manufacturing paradigm, named Cloud Manufacturing (CMfg) is paid attraction by industries and academia. In this CMfg environment, the different kinds of manufacturing resources are encapsulated as manufacturing services (MSs), which are able to provide users with various machining/producing services and also can independently make decisions by themselves. Hence users can select different manufacturing services to help them finish their tasks together. In this paper, two different preferential selection mechanisms are used to select MSs, namely the local preferential and the global preferential selection. Therefore, there are two different relationship structures between tasks and MSs to be formed and a bipartite network is used to describe this relationship structures. For exploring the effect of the relationship structures on cooperative behaviors, the Stag Hunt game is used to describe their behavioral strategies in the processing of their repeated interactions. Lastly the agent-based modeling and simulating are used to analyze the cooperative behaviors of MSs in the process of repeated game with Repast. The simulating and analyzing result shows that different relationship structures are influenced on the emergence of cooperative behaviors in the CMfg environment.