eMarketplace Model: An Architecture for Collaborative Supply Chain Management and Integration

The current economic climate forces businesses to collaborate more frequently and build efficient organizations and supply chains that reduce timeto-market and costs. This chapter argues that an electronic marketplace (eMarketplace) is a promising architectural model to develop collaborative supply chain management and integration platform. It supports coordination mechanisms and integration at the business and systems levels of the enterprise and the supply chain. In this architecture, the eMarketplace exists as a collection of economically motivated software agents of service-oriented cooperative distributed systems. It enables and supports common integration and economic services between market participants. This chapter presents an agent-oriented dynamic trading mechanism that produces an integrated supply chain for the eMarketplace. Future eMarketplaces need to support both market-based and relationship-based supply chains. To this end, this chapter discusses coordination approaches based on market mechanisms such as auctions and multi-issue negotiation. The objective is to enable business entities to obtain efficient resource allocation while preserving long-term relationships.