Research On Automated Negotiation Based Supply Chain Interdependent Order Allocation Problem

In recent years,more and more scholars pay attention to the negotiation-based supply chain order allocation problem.The goal of this problem is to effectively allocate the orders from the demanders to the suppliers through negotiation,as well as to assure the satisfied profits of both the demanders and the suppliers.Nowadays,the negotiation-based order allocation problem mainly concerned the one-to-many and many-to-many allocation in terms of the demander/supplier relationship.with respect to the one-to-many allocation,current researches aim to study the influence of the competition and the cooperation among the suppliers on the allocation results.With respect to the many-to-many allocation,current researches focus on the demanders with independent orders who compete for the suppliers.However,in the real supply chain environment,such a situation exists that the orders of different demanders are interdependent of each other.In order to successfully allocate the orders,the demanders not only compete for the common resources but also cooperate with each other to reach mutually accepted solutions.At the same time,the suppliers also need to achieve the orders through competition and cooperation.Thus,an interdependent order allocation problem in a two-echelon competitive and cooperative supply chain is considered in this paper.Firstly,the paper describes the basic order allocation process and analyzes the conflicts among the different supply chain partners which arise during the allocation process.In order to efficiently resolve the conflicts,the automated negotiation is introduced in this paper.Then,a math model of the problem is constructed from the aspects of the interdependent orders,the offers from different partners,the objectives of the demanders and the suppliers.Based on the formal definition of our order allocation problem,a negotiation mechanism which includes the modified Contract Net Protocol,the argumentation-based negotiation,and the compensation negotiation is developed to support the order allocation process.Furthermore,the local and global negotiation strategies are proposed for the demanders to facilitate the conflicts resolution.The elite strategy and the tournament strategy in terms of the supplier selection strategy are proposed for the demander.In addition,the entire bidding strategy and the randomly bidding strategy are proposed for the suppliers.The experiments find out that better allocation results can be obtained when the global negotiation strategy,the tournament strategy and the randomly bidding strategy are used.Then,the efficiency and the effectiveness of the interdependent order allocation under different supply chain contexts are analyzed.It finds out that orders of various sizes and various degrees of interdependence can be successfully allocated,and the better results can be obtained when the supplier size is within a medium range.