An Agent-based Framework for Partner Selection with Sustainability Considerations

Abstract

This paper presents a multi-agent system (MAS) to support partner selection in a sustainable supply chain network. With the growing awareness of environmental and social issues globally, governments and industry have recognized that they have vital roles in supporting and assuring sustainable development. In consideration of these concerns, companies worldwide have begun to adopt sustainability practices in the supply chain. An important issue of sustainability practices is to involve the sustainability considerations into organizational purchasing decision and long term relationships with suppliers. That is, in the selection of suppliers and outsourcing partners, enterprises should not only consider the general criteria, but also should consider the environmental and social impacts of their partners. Evaluation and selection of partners is a typical multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem involving both qualitative and quantitative issues. For the implementation of supply chain sustainability, issues regarding environmental and social responsibility are to be included in partner evaluation, in addition to the conventional criteria such as price, quality, delivery, and service. In this paper, the MAS is established to integrate sustainability concerns into the supply chain partner evaluation and selection process. Autonomous agents are established to represent various parties and functions of the supply chain, for instance, a buyer agent represents the buyer and the potential suppliers are represented by seller agents. The buyer agent has to exchange bids with the seller agents on the multiple criteria repeatedly. The MAS is equipped with suitable negotiation strategies and negotiation protocol to all agents. It supports multilateral negotiation, that is, the buyer agent is able to interact with many seller agents concurrently in the bidding process.