A multi-agent protocol for multilateral negotiations in supply chain management

Within a supply chain network, it is common for companies to engage in negotiations to resolve conflicts in task allocation and order fulfilment problems. This kind of supply chain negotiation is usually regarded as buyer–seller negotiation. In recent years, multi-agent systems have been established to automate buyer–seller negotiations. However, most have limitations in handling complex negotiation scenarios such as multilateral negotiations and multi-issue negotiations. This paper presents ECNPro (the Extended Contract-Net-like multilateral Protocol), which is a new multi-agent protocol for handling buyer–seller negotiations in supply chain management. ECNPro is designed to handle agent bargaining and interactions in complex multilateral and multi-issue negotiations in which the buyer has to negotiate with many suppliers. The multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT) approach is adopted to establish the utility functions for a set of negotiation issues in the bargaining process. It adopts a multi-threaded approach to allow the buyer to bargain concurrently with multiple suppliers. ECNPro is able to split an order to more than one supplier to achieve a better negotiation payoff. In addition, mobile agents are employed in ECNPro, the buyer sends mobile agents to sites of the sellers to conduct bargaining locally. This approach improves the negotiation efficiency significantly.