Integrating Multi-agent Negotiation to Resolve Constraints in Fulfilling Supply Chain Orders

As the order fulfillment process (OFP) in supply chains shifts to outsourcing paradigm, the OFP performance relies on the coordination among supply chain partners to reach executable and effective plans. The coordination of OFP among supply chain partners can be viewed as a distributed constraint satisfaction problem (DCSP). This paper enhances the existing methods to solve the DCSP by adding the multi-agent negotiation mechanism. We evaluated its enhancement on the OFP in the context of the metal industry via experiments and compared it with the centralized coordination mechanism. The results show that the integrated system outperforms the existing distributed constraint satisfaction algorithms in various demand patterns.