Agent Communication and Negotiation in a Supply Chain

Abstract

Supply Chain Management is an essential management paradigm for almost every organization. Effective implementation of Supply Chain Management (SCM) can significantly increase an organization’s profit. In this paper, a simple SCM is implemented using multi-agent modeling. A typical SCM consists of the supplier, manufacturer, inventory, seller, and customer. A multi-agent system provides a natural solution for SCM because various entities involved in SCM can be represented as intelligent agents. In the present approach various agents representing various entities of SCM, negotiate with each other in order to achieve their goals. Apart from the entities associated with typical SCM, additional entities have been added to the proposed system. This system consists of six agents representing the SCM entities: Customer Agent, Seller Agent, Coordinator Agent, Inventory Agent, Manufacturer Agent, and Supplier Agent. The system also consists of other agents to initialize the system and the database.