The competitive global market has placed great pressures on manufacturing organisations in coping with dynamic customer demands.In order to strive for greater market shares,manufacturing organisations must be capable of rapid coping with changes.This paper introduces an agent-based iterative bidding mechanism,which aims at facilitating the integration of the functions of production planning and control,so as to dynamically optimise the utilisation of manufacturing resources in response to market changes.This bidding mechanism is also used as a means for co-ordinating the agents.The agent bidding process is carried out based on a currency scheme,in which all jobs are assigned with virtual currency values and agents bid for the jobs based on these values.The currency values are adjusted iteratively and the agents re-bid for the jobs based on the new set of currency values.This bidding process takes place iteratively until the total production cost is minimised.In this way,the optimisation of the utilisation of manufacturing resources can also be achieved.To deal with the adjustment of currency values,a Tabu Search optimisation algorithm is proposed.In the implementation of the agent system,a test case is presented and the results will also he discussed.