Towards an agent-based negotiation platform for cooperative decision-making in construction supply chain

Abstract

Negotiation is an effective and popular decision-making and coordination behavior in inter-organizations systems, especially in construction supply chain (CSC) which is characterized with fragmentation, low efficiency and multiple partners. This research proposes a multi-agent based negotiation platform for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of cooperative decisionmaking in CSC adopting agent technology and regarding CSC as a typical multi-agent system. General structure of the agent based negotiation platform is designed, which includes two kinds of agent group: specialty agents and service agents. Since different members in CSC have different preferences on the decision attributes (such as cost, time, quality, safety and environment), a multi-attribute negotiation model is established by designing negotiation protocol and describing the negotiation process. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.