A CSP-Based Model for Integrated Supply Chains

Short Presentations: Papers (Refereed)

Supply Chain Integration is a very important problem for business to business electronic commerce. An integrated supply chain allows businesses to share real-time information and drastically reduce transaction costs. This paper describes our efforts to model the order selection and negotiation process as a multi-agent system based on Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP). A negotiating agent can represent each company along the supply chain. The core capabilities of such agents can be modeled as a set of CSPs. These agents can generate a purchase plan to meet the company’s demands. Negotiation will be triggered when no satisfactory plan can be found. Strategies are identified to relax some of the constraints to generate counter proposals.