BTO supply chain configuration via agent-based negotiation

摘要

This paper presents a constraint-based contract net protocol for agent-based configuration of a Build-To-Order (BTO) supply chain. Applicability of BTO supply chain configuration using intelligent agents has been proved in many research works. Mainly this is due to the fact that both agent-based systems and supply chains consist of a number of independent units that have to collaborate in order to achieve the goal set. Here presented negotiation protocol is a development of the contract net protocol. The latter has been extended with iterative negotiation process, constraint-based information exchange/processing and other features. This allowed improving solutions, but the negotiation time increased. The analysis of the negotiation time for the modified protocol showed that it linearly depends on the product complexity (number of product components) and quadratically on the being configured supply chain complexity (number of suppliers).