An Adaptive Supplier Selection Mechanism in E-Procurement Marketplace

Abstract

B2B e-commerce has fundamentally changed the way in which an organization purchases goods/service. Nowadays, the adoption of e-procurement, which means the electronic acquisition of goods/service, has been prevalent in supply chain management. A variety of supplier selection models have been developed in supply chain management literature. In this research, an adaptive supplier selection mechanism is proposed to help buyers evaluate suppliers in an e-marketplace. A Multi-Agent System simulation package of Repast is used to create a realistic environment where different kinds of suppliers and buyers equipped with the proposed selection model can interact so as to study the performance of the proposed selection model. We evaluate three supplier selection models and find that our proposed model outperforms the other two in terms of robustness and performance.