Virtual Enterprise Coalition Strategy with Game Theoretic Multi-Agent Paradigm

Nowadays, Virtual Enterprise (VE) is a crucial paradigm of business management in agile environment. VE exists in several kinds of organizations, although the complexity of the each enterprise in VE may vary greatly. Clearly, there is a need for a mechanism through which these different enterprises can be integrated together. In this paper, we focus on negotiation process in VE formulation as a basic research to clarify its effective management. Each enterprise in VE is defined as software agent with multi-utilities and a framework of multi-agent programming with game theoretic approach is proposed as negotiation algorithm amongst the agents. We develop a computer simulation model to form VE through multiple negotiations amongst several potential partners, and finally clarify the formulation dynamism with the proposed negotiation process.