E-Procurement Process: Negotiation and Auction Approaches for SMEs

E-procurement transactions in Business to Business (B2B) environment showed a constant and positive trend in the last years. The most popular methodologies to support these tools are all related to dedicated protocols able to facilitate the agreements among customers and suppliers. This chapter proposes a Multi Agent Architecture integrated with several multi-attribute auction mechanisms specifically designed to support the e-procurement processes. Moreover, differently from other cases proposed in literature, the suppliers’ proposal formulation is strongly influenced by their production plans. A simulative environment has been developed in order to evaluate different performances: the customer and suppliers’ utilities, the profit distribution among the involved agents and the time necessary to reach an agreement. The mentioned approaches are compared with a negotiation process. The simulation results highlight the weakness and strength points of each auction protocol and why they can be considered as a relevant tool in B2B environments

A game theoretic coordination for trading capacity in Multi-Site Factory Environment

Multisite factories geographically distributed often have to implement an opportune tool to integrate their resources and demand forecasts in order to gather a specific production objective. The proposed research develops a distributed approach, for a network of independent enterprises, able to facilitate the capacity process by using a multiagent architecture and a cooperative protocol. The last one is based on game theory and, in particular, on Nash bargaining solution. Moreover, a discrete simulation environment has been developed to compare the proposed approach with the one in which no cooperation among enterprises exist. Several simulation scenarios were conducted to analyze the perfor- mances’ trends in various environment conditions. The goal has been the evaluation of the unallocated capacity, the unsatisfied demand, the profits generated by the network, the distribution of the transactions among the plants, and the number of activated links among plants. The simulation results show that the proposed approach leads to a better performance indexes and more relevant benefits when the dynamicity of the environment growths

Capacity Sharing Issue in an Electronic Co-Opetitive Network: A Simulative Approach

In recent years, manufacturing companies have entered a new era in which all manufacturing enterprises must compete in a global economy. To stay competitive, companies must use production systems that only produce their goods with high productivity, but also allow rapid response to market changes and customers’ needs. The emerging new paradigm of inter-firm relations involving both cooperative and competitive elements, called co-opetition, seems well face this issue. The chapter proposes a multi agent architecture to support different coordination policy in an electronic co-opetitive network in which plants are willing to exchange productive capacity. An innovative approach based on cooperative game theory is proposed in this research and its performance is compared with the prevalent negotiation approach. A discrete event simulation environment has been developed in order to evaluate the related performances. The case in which no relation exists among plants has been considered as a benchmark. The obtained results show that the proposed approach outperforms the negotiation mechanism form many point of view

Coalitional Added Services in a Linear Neutral e-Marketplace: An Approach Based on the Shapley Value

The increase of transactions by electronic commerce (e-commerce) in Business to Business applications has a constant trend during last years. Many research reports have focused on negotiation and auction mechanisms in this context, but a smaller number of related research attempts, has chosen to develop coalition approaches This research attempt tries to overcome this gap by an innovative coalition model for a private neutral linear e-marketplace that combines a full integration between customer’s request and supplier’s planning activity. The Shapley value approach is proposed to manage the profit sharing activity among the coalition participants. The Shapley value is an approach of game theory used to share a gain in coalition games. A proper simulation environment has been designed and modeled in order to measure the “stay-together economy” achievable within the proposed innovative e-marketplace. The simulation results highlight how the proposed approach increases the performance level of the e-marketplace: specifically the suppliers gain more benefits than the customers through the possibility of establishing coalitions

Workload Assignment In Production Networks By Multi-Agent Architecture

Distributed production networks are considered organizational structures able to match agility and efficiency necessary to compete in the global market. Performances of such organization structures heavily depend on the ability of the network actors of coordinating their activities. This chapter concerns the low level of the production planning that is aim is to allocation the orders to the distributed plant. The orders assigned by the medium level have to be allocated to the plant able to manufacture the product. A this level the coordination among the plant is crucial activity to purse an high level of performance. In this context, three approaches for coordinating production planning activities within production networks are proposed. Moreover, the proposed approaches are modeled and designed by a Multi Agent Technology and a negotiation model is proposed. In order to test the functionality of the proposed agent based distributed architecture for distributed production planning, a proper simulation environment has been developed. Moreover, a benchmark model is proposed in order to evaluate the performances of the proposed approaches. The Multi Agent System and simulation environment can be utilized to learn the optimal coordination policy to adopt in distributed production planning problem

Capacity sharing in a network of independent factories: A cooperative game theory approach

Market changes, uncertainties and unpredictability characterize the market environment nowadays. The possibility to cooperate in a network allows companies to stay competitive. This paper proposes a game theory coordination mechanism for a network of independent plants; the approach is based on the OWEN's theorem properly simulated in order to investigate different performances in various environmental conditions. To support the network and face the capacity sharing issue, a Multi-Agent Architecture has been specifically developed. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism could be considered a valid alternative to the more usual negotiation approaches in several market conditions. The plants gain considerable benefits by participating in a network supported by the cooperative mechanism proposed

Production Planning, Negotiation and Coalition integration: a new tool for an innovative e-business model

Despite the positive expectations and although they are nowadays considered the most spread Business to Business (B2B) solution, e-marketplaces are still far from representing a real tool for the extended enterprise: as the dramatic down-turn in the e-commerce sector demonstrated, e-business initiatives require solid business models that clearly relate the services provided to the overall profitability of the company. In this paper, we take a particular but quite general e-marketplace business model as our point of departure and use that model to motivate the development of algorithms to support management of trade among buyers and sellers. Specifically, e-marketplaces profitability can be increased by an integration of production planning, negotiation and coalition support tools. Production planning tools allow to create a link between commercialization and production activities, supplying a better service for customer, negotiation tools allow to make transactions taking into account both buyers’ and sellers’ goals and, finally, coalition represent the proposed course of action for small and medium suppliers not able to fully respond to the customer requests. This paper presents an innovative approach, based on multi-agent system, and a concerning simulation test-bed conducted to demonstrate, in a quantitative way, the advantages arising by adopting the proposed approach