Multi-agent negotiation based on price schedules algorithm for distributed collaborative design

Collaborative design is a common practice in modern product development. Companies specializing in different disciplines, which are often geographically separated, work together to develop solutions for the benefit of overall design. In such inter-organizational collaboration, participants hiding individual skills and design rationales is highly desirable. To fulfill this requirement, this study proposes a negotiation mechanism based on a price schedules decomposition algorithm originally developed in economics. The mechanism searches for globally optimal designs, where no participant is necessary to own full knowledge of the entire design space. This paper also applies multi-agent system technologies to realize a secure environment for automating distributed collaborative design. A test scenario of distributed tolerance allocation in assembly design validates the proposed mechanism. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.