A Multi-agent Based System For E-procurement Exception Management

Electronic procurement (e-procurement) is a technology that facilitates the acquisition of commodities through the internet. A purchasing process can be completely revolutionized by e-procurement as e-procurement automates all the major steps of the purchasing process such as definition of product requirements, search and selection for suppliers, negotiation and contracting with suppliers. Not surprisingly, e-procurement technologies have promised to provide significant benefits to companies who venture into them. These advantages include reducing administrative costs, cutting down the order fulfillment cycle time, lowering inventory levels and the price paid for goods, and preparing organizations for collaborating with others.An e-procurement system focuses on simplification and automation of a procurement process, but challenges to the success of a procurement process remain since various uncertainties from internal and external environments, such as demand uncertainty, delivery delay, inventory failure, natural disaster, and unexpected exceptions, happen in the process. For example, if suppliers can not deliver the commodities in time, buyers should be given timely notice of the delay. When delays cannot be tolerated by buyers, an e-procurement system should be able to automatically find alternative suppliers. Thus, the flexibility to handle the uncertainties, such as run time exceptions, is critical for any e-procurement system. Although the existing research has investigated the impact, risks, and uncertainties for adopting e-procurement in enterprise environment, limited support is offered to handle exceptions in e-procurement management. In order to fill this void, an e-procurement system with exception management is proposed in this research.We firstly develop a framework for an e-procurement system, which consists of four modules, i.e., searching, negotiating, selecting, and exception handling. Given that intelligent agents are autonomous and can reason using specific knowledge and then react to different situation accordingly, intelligent agents are capable of dealing with the uncertainty and enhancing flexibility in e-commerce transactions. Thus, we develop an agent, based system to implement the e-procurement framework. In our system, different tasks in the procurement process, such as searching, negotiating, selecting, exception monitoring and handling, are delegated to a number of both autonomous and collaborative agents. Through the collaboration and interaction between different agents, the architecture that we propose can enhance the flexibility to handle unexpected exceptions, thus leading to agile procurement management. In addition, we try to integrate agent technology with web services to benefit from both of the technologies. By using web services technology, it is easier for our system to collaborate with other systems and the modules in our system can also be invoked by other web services modules with similar functions.Finally, we develop a prototype based on JADE platform. Further, we simulate several exceptions in the e-procurement process and investigate how our system handles the exceptions. The results of the experiment demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our system to handle such exceptions so that the enterprise procurement process can be fulfilled successfully.