Collaborative agent-based negotiation in supply chain planning

Abstract : Collaborative supply chains partners must interact in order to satisfy customer needs. These interactions can take various forms, such as information exchanges or requests for actions to be performed, or more advanced forms of operations coordination or cooperation. Negotiation mechanisms can be used to find an acceptable agreement between partners or to collectively search for a coordination solution. In various situations different negotiation protocols can be used and it can be difficult (or impossible) to determine a priori the dominant protocol in each situation. This paper proposes to study the performance of using of a variety of negotiation protocols and compare this strategy to using a single one. We are particularly interested in simulating collaborative automated negotiations between production planning agents from the same supply chain. Using an implementation of multi-behavior agents in an agent-based planning platform, simulation results of different negotiation protocols in various environmental conditions are presented.