Coalition formation and its application in planning for agile, manufacturing cell

Coalition formation has been an active area of research that has attracted both theoretical and practical researchers in the areas of economics, distributed artificial intelligence (DAI), computer systems and some other industrial applications. As an effective mechanism, it has an emergent characteristic of being suitable for solving cooperation problems in both complex and dynamic environments. While task planning of agile manufacturing cell (AMC) is to dynamically allocate tasks on the level of manufacturing cells, where two types of coalitions are formed. In view of the linkage between them, the idea of coalition formation is applied in the planning of AMC. In this paper, a framework of AMC planning is presented, based on which, a planning method of AMC by searching for coalition structure is introduced in detail. In addition, a case study is carried out.