Supply chain coordination of construction management based on multi-agent

Abstract

This paper designs a multi-agent based framework for supply chain coordination in construction management through adopting the agent technology and regarding the construction supply chain as a typical multi-agent system. This framework integrates the specialty agents (contractor agent, designer agent, supplier agent, owner agent) and service agents (coordinator agent, monitor agent, name server agent) into a multi-agent system through the Internet. Since different members in the construction supply chain have different preferences on the decision attributes (such as cost, time, quality, safety and environment), a multi-attribute negotiation mechanism is established by constructing the multi-attribute negotiation model, describing the multi-attribute negotiation process, and designing the multi-attribute negotiation protocol. The establishment of this mechanism for construction supply chain coordination is based on negotiation theory and utility theory and aimed at promoting the coordination between specialty agents in it. Finally, the prototype system is developed by using a multi-agent system development environment. The experiment indicates that can solve problems in the construction supply chain operation and provides a solution to supply chain coordination in construction.