Agent-based Negotiation Model Research Articles

An Agent-Based Bilateral Negotiation Model About Price and Quantity Considering Nonlinear Utility

An Agent-Based Bilateral Negotiation Model About Price and Quantity Considering Nonlinear Utility

An agent-based negotiation model for supplier selection of multiple products with synergy effect

Supplier selection is an important problem in supply chain management (SCM), and has attracted the attention of many researchers. Tremendous effort has been spent on the development of agent-based systems to automate supplier selection negotiation process in SCM applications. In this kind of multi-agent system (MAS), software agents are established to represent various parties and functions involving in the supplier selection negotiation process. Most of current systems only deal with relatively simple negotiations involving the acquisition of one product, they are not sufficient to support complex negotiations involving multiple products with synergy effect. However, in practice, it is common for a purchasing company to procure multiple products simultaneously, and the synergy effects that exist between products could affect the final choice of cooperative suppliers. This paper presents an agent-based negotiation model to automate the supplier selection process involving a bundle of products with synergy effect. A MAS is established to realize the proposed negotiation model for multi-product supplier selection. Furthermore, the negotiation proposal, negotiation protocol, negotiation strategies, and decision making methods involving in the negotiation model are elaborated for the multi-product supplier selection environment. Through the proposed negotiation model, the purchasing company and suppliers can reach agreements on the details of products simultaneously and exploit the synergy effect between products. Finally, illustrative examples are conducted to demonstrate the function and effectiveness of the negotiation model for multi-product supplier selection.

An Agent-based Negotiation Model Selector for Managing Negotiation Processes in Corrective and Preventive Actions: A Conceptual Framework

Negotiation is an important process of management in any organizations especially if it involves quality management such as in corrective and preventive actions (CPA). The ability of software agent to implement automated negotiation can help organizations resolve or avoid conflicts. While many negotiation models have been developed, studies in intelligent selection of integrated negotiation models are still lacking. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for an agent-based negotiation model selector engine to resolve conflicts in the CPA activities. Several software agents will be involved to operate the proposed engine, in order to assist organizations in resolving conflicts and maintaining high quality management.

An agent-based negotiation model on price and delivery date in a fashion supply chain

Price and due-date negotiation between supply chain members is a critical issue. Motivated by industrial practice, we consider in this paper a make-to-order fashion supply chain in which the downstream manufacturer and the upstream supplier are cooperative on due-date and competitive on price. We propose a two-phase negotiation agenda based on such characteristics, and aim to find an optimal solution to deal with the negotiation problem considering production cost and mutual benefit. We build an analytical negotiation model for a manufacturer-supplier pair, discuss their utilities, and examine the Pareto efficiency frontier from the theoretical perspective. After that, from an application perspective, we build an agent-based two-phase negotiation system where agents are used to represent the two parties to enhance communication. In the cooperative phase, a simulated annealing based intelligent algorithm is employed to help the manufacturer agent and the supplier agent search tentative agreement on due dates which can minimize the total supply chain cost. In the competitive phase, the two parties bargain on the pricing issue using concession based methods. They adjust the reservation value and aspiration value for pricing accordingly based on the integrated utility and the result of the previous phase. Simulation results show that, the proposed negotiation approach can achieve optimal utility of agents and reach a win-win situation for the bilateral parties. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to further generate insights on how different parameters affect the performance of the proposed system.

Reaching Unanimous Agreements Within Agent-Based Negotiation Teams With Linear and Monotonic Utility Functions

In this article, an agent-based negotiation model for negotiation teams that negotiate a deal with an opponent is presented. Agent-based negotiation teams are groups of agents that join together as a single negotiation party because they share an interest that is related to the negotiation process. The model relies on a trusted mediator that coordinates and helps team members in the decisions that they have to take during the negotiation process: which offer is sent to the opponent, and whether the offers received from the opponent are accepted. The main strength of the proposed negotiation model is the fact that it guarantees unanimity within team decisions since decisions report a utility to team members that is greater than or equal to their aspiration levels at each negotiation round. This work analyzes how unanimous decisions are taken within the team and the robustness of the model against different types of manipulations. An empirical evaluation is also performed to study the impact of the different parameters of the model.

Distributed project scheduling with information sharing in supply chains: part I—an agent-based negotiation model

Distributed project scheduling problem (DPSP) in supply chains is concerned with configuration and scheduling of multiple projects in a network of independent and autonomous enterprises. Individual enterprises must collaborate with each other during two main stages: the configuration of a project—selection of contractors for performing project operations and the project scheduling—determining when the operations start. However, the collaboration is especially difficult because none of these enterprises holds the global information about the entire supply chain and all constituent enterprises. Instead, they have to capitalize whatever information is shared between them in order to solve their own local problems in a distributed and autonomous fashion. It is essential for the solution process to strike an overall balance between effectiveness and efficiency. The research, reported in this two-part paper, is aimed at proposing a negotiation-based algorithm for solving DPSP. Its emphasis is how to improve the convergence and quality of the solution by taking advantage of inter-enterprise information sharing especially the sharing of schedule flexibility information (SFI). The first part of this paper describes a new agent-based approach to DPSPs in supply chains while the second part will present detailed discussion on the theoretical and experimental analysis.

B2B 협상을 위한 사용자 인터페이스 모델

One of the characteristics the agent-based negotiation model has is that we have to input the related parameters together. Considering such properties as vagueness, incompleteness and dynamism B2B domain inherently has this may be an unreasonable request. In this paper we suggested a user interface model for B2B negotiation which mainly focussed on this problem. The suggested model supports such functions as a two dimensional negotiation space, diverse negotiation modes and emotion-based control mechanism. In this paper, we tried to show how these three functions can be used for improving the usefulness of the existing agent-based negotiation model.