The Emergence of Cooperative Behaviors under the Incentive Mechanism of Profit Allocation in a Cloud Manufacturing Environment

Abstract

Cloud Manufacturing (CMfg) is an emerging service-oriented manufacturing paradigm in the last few years. This innovative manufacturing paradigm provides users with a platform in which distributed geographically manufacturing resources are encapsulated as Manufacturing Services (MSs). And also in this platform these MSs can autonomously interact with users and independently make decisions whether they help users to finish their tasks. Usually one task needs several MSs to work together to finish it. In this paper, a bipartite network is used to depict the relationship between tasks and MSs and a multi-player game model is put forward to model the behavioral strategies of MSs in this CMfg environment. A profit allocation mechanism is presented to encourage the cooperative behaviors of MSs in the process of task completion. At last, Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) is used to model and simulate of the mutual relation of MSs and develop a multi-agent system with Repast. The simulating result shows that the effective profit allocation can urge the emergence of cooperative behaviors.