Experience Management for Multi-agent Supply Chains: Trust, Planning and Negotiation

Supply chain management (SCM) is currently mainly based on older information retrieval methods. It generally has not taken advantage of the ‘dynamic’ information that is now available due to developments in information and communication technology (ICT) and knowledge management (KM). The focus has also changed from a supply-side view of optimizing production efficiency to a demand–side view of consumers driving the process. Supply chains are developing into demand networks that adapt to consumer demand in almost real time (Silisque et al, 2003). With moving towards real-time enterprises there is an imperative need for rapid automated and intelligent response in the supply network. Further, suppliers and customers in traditional SC have been transformed into intelligent agents of suppliers or customers in esupply chain (e-SC) so that an e-SC can be considered as a form of agent society. Under this new situation, how to manage trust and negotiation between the intelligent agents within an e-SC is a significant issue, which is more complex than that in the traditional SC. This is because the trust and negotiation in an e-SC are based on interaction and communication between human suppliers and customers, between human suppliers (or customers) and their intelligent agents, between intelligent supplier agents and intelligent buyer agents (Sun & Finnie, 2004a).