Title: BTO supply chain configuration via agent-based negotiation

Authors: Alexander Smirnov, Nikolay Shilov, Alexey Kashevnik

Addresses: St.Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 39, 14th line, St.Petersburg 199178, Russia. ' St.Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 39, 14th line, St.Petersburg 199178, Russia. ' St.Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 39, 14th line, St.Petersburg 199178, Russia

Abstract: This paper presents a constraint-based contract net protocol for agent-based configuration of a Build-To-Order (BTO) supply chain. Applicability of BTO supply chain configuration using intelligent agents has been proved in many research works. Mainly this is due to the fact that both agent-based systems and supply chains consist of a number of independent units that have to collaborate in order to achieve the goal set. Here presented negotiation protocol is a development of the contract net protocol. The latter has been extended with iterative negotiation process, constraint-based information exchange/processing and other features. This allowed improving solutions, but the negotiation time increased. The analysis of the negotiation time for the modified protocol showed that it linearly depends on the product complexity (number of product components) and quadratically on the being configured supply chain complexity (number of suppliers).

Keywords: build-to-order; BTO supply chains; supply chain configuration; agent-based negotiation; contract net negotiation protocol; constraint-based information representation; agent-based systems; multi-agent systems; MAS; supply chain management; SCM; intelligent agents.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMTM.2009.023784

International Journal of Manufacturing Technology and Management, 2009 Vol.17 No.1/2, pp.166 - 183

Published online: 11 Mar 2009 *

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