Automated negotiation based on contract net and petri net

Abstract

In agent-mediated electronic markets, an agent may delegate part of the assigned tasks to other agents to achieve the business objectives via establishment of contracts. Electronic contracting relies on an effective model to automate the negotiation processes and analyze the feasibility of the resulting contracts. In this paper, we concentrated on automated negotiation mechanism in contract manufacturing supply chains. Contract manufacturing has been widely accepted in many industries. Time and cost are two significant factors to be negotiated in contract manufacturing. Formation of contract manufacturing supply chain networks is based on the contract orders and tends to be more dynamic than ever to accommodate the fast changing innovative technologies, products and customers' preference. Optimization of such contract manufacturing supply chain networks usually relies on coordination among the trading partners and is much more difficult than traditional production networks. The objectives of this paper are to propose a framework to model the negotiation processes in contract manufacturing, analyze the feasibility of the contracts and optimize contract awarding based on the proposed model. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.