A hybrid multi-agent negotiation protocol supporting agent mobility in virtual enterprises

It is a growing trend for supply chain members to collaborate in a virtual enterprise (VE). As VE members are usually geographically dispersed and they have to cooperate and negotiate to achieve mutual agreements, the distributive multi-agent systems (MAS) are being increasingly adopted for VE implementation. To cope with the flexibility requirements of VE, a new MAS architecture is proposed in this paper. In this MAS, the VE initiator can be represented by either stationary or mobile agents to negotiate with VE partners. As there is not a mobile agent-based negotiation scheme considering both the negotiation effectiveness and system security, a hybrid multi-agent negotiation protocol is established in this paper to tackle this problem. This hybrid protocol incorporates both the stationary and mobile agent negotiation phases to compose a more efficient and successful multilateral agent interaction regulation. In this negotiation process, mobile agent-based negotiation is first initiated, it will then switch to stationary agent-based negotiation when mobile agent migration is rejected or interaction is blocked in the remote host. Besides, the ontology-based approach is adopted in the MAS and an embedding ontology operation protocol is established to refine the knowledge expression pattern in the agent negotiation process. The validity and efficiency of the protocol are verified through the execution of a hypothetical VE negotiation case.