Social Value Propagation for Supply Chain Formation

Supply Chain Formation is the process of determining the participants in a supply chain, who will exchange what with whom, and the terms of the exchanges. Decentralized supply chain formation appears as a highly intricate task because agents only possess local information, have limited knowledge about the capabilities of other agents, and prefer to preserve privacy. State-of-the-art decentralized supply chain formation approaches can either: (i) find supply chains of high value at the expense of high resources usage; or (ii) find supply chains of low value with low resources usage. This work presents chainme, a novel decentralized supply chain formation algorithm. Our results show that chainme finds supply chains with higher value than state-of-the-art decentralized algorithms whilst decreasing the amount of resources required from one up to four orders of magnitude.