Agent-based negotiation mechanism for multi-project human resource allocation

Abstract

Economic globalization has resulted in distributed product development. Companies must effectively integrate and allocate interdisciplinary designers who are geographically dispersed. The matrix-based organization structure is an effective model for multi-project human resource allocation because it satisfies the prescribed total cost constraint and fulfills the requirements of individual disciplines. This study proposes a novel negotiation mechanism for allowing design resources in a distributed environment with nontransparent information. The mechanism was used to consider competitive and cooperative relationships among the entities involved in resource allocation. Price-based negotiation was adopted for the competitive relationship and the Borda count was used in the cooperative relationship. In addition, multi-agent technology was applied to implement the proposed mechanism as an automatic and effective operation. Real cases of distributed product development were used to demonstrate how the negotiation mechanism works and to validate the mechanism’s effectiveness.

Keywords:

• augmented price schedules decomposition
• Borda protocol
• distributed human resource management
• negotiation of allocation
• multi-agent technology