Behavior Simulation of Manufacturing Services in a Cloud Manufacturing Environment

Recently, a kind of service-oriented network manufacturing, cloud manufacturing (CMfg), has been emerged. In a CMfg environment, geographically distributed various manufacturing resources are encapsulated as different manufacturing services with the capability of independent making-decision, which are able to provide users with various services to help them to finish manufacturing tasks. Usually one manufacturing task needs several manufacturing services to work together. Apparently mutual cooperation between manufacturing services plays a crucial part in a CMfg environment. It can ensure service quality and reduce the interaction costs between manufacturing services in the process of collaborative manufacturing. Thus, the building of cooperative relations is an important issue of CMfg. In this paper, to promote the establishment of cooperative relations between manufacturing services and make manufacturing services get the high profit, a behavior learning mechanism is proposed to support the action selection of manufacturing services during the process of repeated interaction. The results show that the relationship of cooperation between manufacturing services can be established by using this mechanism. Moreover, the willingness of cooperation (WOC) of manufacturing services and the profit that is generated by behaviors have an effect on the emergence of cooperative behaviors of manufacturing services.