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Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
Volume 5, Issue 4, Winter 2006, Pages 313-322
Web-enabled Business and Customer Value
 
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doi:10.1016/j.elerap.2006.04.003    How to Cite or Link Using DOI (Opens New Window)
Copyright © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Integrating multi-agent negotiation to resolve constraints in fulfilling supply chain orders

Fu-ren Lina, Corresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author and You-yu Linb

aInstitute of Technology Management, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu City 300, Taiwan, ROC bDepartment of Information Management, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung City 804, Taiwan, ROC

Received 20 April 2005; 
revised 28 February 2006; 
accepted 27 April 2006. 
Available online 12 June 2006.

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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






Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
Volume 5, Issue 4, Winter 2006, Pages 313-322
Web-enabled Business and Customer Value
 
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