A cooperative partner selection method for networked manufacturing systems

Partner selection becomes more and more important in networked manufacturing systems. The description of task decomposition for the products manufacturing is presented in geographically distributed environment before the task is invited for bidding. A ldquothree stagesrdquo selection method is proposed which includes initial selection, careful selection and elaborate selection. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is applied in the careful selection stage. The genetic algorithm combined with simulated annealing algorithm is presented due to accept some non-optimized results at random in the searching process. An example is used to verify the application of the proposed algorithm.