Production planning, negotiation and coalition integration: A new tool for an innovative e-business model

Despite the positive expectations and although they are nowadays considered the most spread Business to Business (B2B) solution, e-marketplaces are still far from representing a real tool for the extended enterprise: as the dramatic down-turn in the e-commerce sector demonstrated, e-business initiatives require solid business models that clearly relate the services provided to the overall profitability of the company. In this paper, we take a particular but quite general e-marketplace business model as our point of departure and use that model to motivate the development of algorithms to support management of trade among buyers and sellers. Specifically, e-marketplaces profitability can be increased by an integration of production planning, negotiation and coalition support tools. Production planning tools allow to create a link between commercialization and production activities, supplying a better service for customer, negotiation tools allow to make transactions taking into account both buyers’ and sellers’ goals and, finally, coalition represent the proposed course of action for small and medium suppliers not able to fully respond to the customer requests. This paper presents an innovative approach, based on multi-agent system, and a concerning simulation test-bed conducted to demonstrate, in a quantitative way, the advantages arising by adopting the proposed approach.