This paper studies an online retail supply chain that includes one referral infomediary and one retailer, in which the infomediary provides demand referral service to retailers and incentive rebates to customers. A linear dual-channel demand with the effect of customer incentive and horizontal service cooperation model was established, and then the optimal policies of infomediary and retailers in centralized and decentralized supply chain were analyzed. Moreover, a horizontal cooperation contract based on customer incentive cost as well as referral service price was developed to coordinate the supply chain. The results revealed that the contract contributed to profit optimization of online retail supply chain and effective win-win cooperation. Finally, we analyze the impact of rebate sensitivity and market share on these optimal policies and illustrate the results by some numerical examples.
The development and maintenance of distributed collaborative manufacturing systems is faced with increasing challenges caused by the technical difficulties and ontological issues in distributed computing, resource integration and knowledge sharing over heterogeneous computing platforms. This paper presents an agentbased Semantic Grid for distributed manufacturing collaboration across ubiquitous virtual enterprises. A hierarchy of autonomous, adaptive agents forming a 'super peer' based peer-to-peer network is laid out in the Semantic Grid to provide, in an open, dynamic, loosely coupled and scalable manner, the service publication, discovery and reuse for management of applications that need to utilise Grid resources. The operation and experimental evaluation of the system are presented to validate the implementation of the proposed approach.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.