Abstract. The supply chain is a worldwide network of suppliers, factories, warehouses, distribution centers, and retailers through which raw materials are acquired, transformed, and delivered to customers. In recent years, a new software architecture for managing the supply chain at the tactical and operational levels has emerged. It views the supply chain as composed of a set of intelligent software agents, each responsible for one or more activities in the supply chain and each interacting with other agents in the planning and execution of their responsibilities. This paper investigates issues and presents solutions for the construction of such an agent-oriented software architecture. The approach relies on the use of an agent building shell, providing generic, reusable, and guaranteed components and services for communicative-act-based communication, conversational coordination, role-based organization modeling, and others. Using these components, we show two nontrivial agent-based supply-chain architectures able to support complex cooperative work and the management of perturbation caused by stochastic events in the supply chain.
We present a generic negotiation architecture that uses MultiAttribute Utility Theory (MAUT) principles to reach agreements that satisfy multiple interdependent objectives. The architecture is built by giving a constraint optimization formulation to the MAUT principles and by using a constraint optimization solver to find the best 'deals' from an agent's local perspective. These are then proposed to other agents via a second component that supports conversational interactions among agents. When received proposals are disjoint from what an agent can currently accept, we provide a systematic constraint relaxation protocol that allows agents to generate the next acceptable 'deal'. This protocol ensures that in the end the Pareto optimal deal will be found, if one exists. The approach is built on top of our Negotiation Engine, a generic architecture for coordination and negotiation that integrates local reasoning, in the form of propositional constraint optimization, with interaction, in the form of conversational exchanges. The system is fully operational, being currently used to automate negotiations in the electronic components domain.
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