MACE: multi-agents coordination engine to resolve conflicts among functional units in an enterprise

The purpose of this paper is to study how a multi-agent-based coordination mechanism can resolve con¯icts among functional units in an enterprise. In the era of information technology, characterized by web technology, intelligent agents demonstrate the best interests of a functional unit when engaged in the highly delicate coordination process of an enterprise. Thus, behavioral problems that occur while coordinating con¯icts among functional units can be avoided effectively. Since there are a number of functional units in an enterprise, the multi-agents are utilized to support the agent-based coordination of con¯icts among several functional units. This paper proposes a new type of multi-agent-based coordination engine termed MACE in which the information exchange between multi-agents is properly controlled via a complicated algorithm. To illustrate the performance of MACE, we devised a cooperative organizational decision support system (CODSS) and incorporated MACE into CODSS, yielding MACE_CODSS. The combined case of production and marketing was introduced and tackled by MACE_CODSS, obtaining the proper coordination results. To verify the improved performance of MACE, we implemented three types of coordination DSS: Joint_CODSS, Separate_CODSS, and None_CODSS. With 12 simulation periods and 100 simulation runs, we obtained comparative coordination results for each coordination type. Statistical tests revealed that the proposed MACE_CODSS produced the most desirable coordination results.