Copyright © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Integrating multi-agent negotiation to resolve constraints in fulfilling supply chain orders
Received 20 April 2005;
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Abstract
As the order fulfillment process (OFP) in supply chains shifts to outsourcing paradigm, the OFP performance relies on the coordination among supply chain partners to reach executable and effective plans. The coordination of OFP among supply chain partners can be viewed as a distributed constraint satisfaction problem (DCSP). This study adds the multi-agent negotiation mechanism to enhance the existing methods to solve the DCSP, and then evaluates the integrated system’s performance through experimentation on the OFP in the context of the metal industry. The experimental results show that the integrated system outperforms the existing distributed constraint satisfaction algorithms in various demand patterns.
Keywords: Order fulfillment process; Supply chain management; Distributed constraint satisfaction problem (DCSP); Negotiation; Multi-agent systems
Article Outline
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Modeling the OFP in supply chains as the DCSP
- 2.1. The OFP in supply chains
- 2.2. Modeling the OFP in supply chains as the DCSP
- 2.3. Distributed constraint satisfaction algorithms (DCSA)
- 3. The integration of multi-agent negotiation with the DCSA
- 3.1. Multi-agent negotiation
- 3.2. FIPA and JADE
- 3.3. The integrated multi-agent negotiation system for solving DCSP
- 3.4. Local constraint resolution
- 3.5. Global constraint resolution
- 4. Experimental design
- 4.1. Experimental settings
- 4.2. Experimentation
- 4.3. Four evaluation criteria
- 5. Evaluation and discussions
- 5.1. Evaluation results of the distributed coordination model
- 5.2. The explanation of experimental results
- 6. Conclusions
- References






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