Coalition Formation Based Multi-item Multi-attribute Negotiation of Supply Chain Networks

In this paper, a coalition formation based negotiation protocol, which aims to reduce the workload and time of the manufacturer agent (MA), is proposed for the material supplier agent (MSA) to find partners to establish a coalition when the order is out of its ability. Concessions among the multi-attribute are considered by MA and MSAs to tradeoff the multi-attribute according to their preferences. Stackelberg game is introduced to find the equilibrium of the multi-item multi-attribute negotiation. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed protocol are verified by computational experiments.