A multi-lateral negotiation protocol for buyer-seller negotiation in supply chain management

This paper presents an agent-based multilateral negotiation protocol for supporting buyer-seller negotiation activities in supply chain management. The proposed multilateral bargaining protocol, which extends from the contract net protocol (CNP), divides the multilateral bargaining process into a series of steps to facilitate agents to reach a promising outcome. It involves four predefined players, eleven negotiation primitives, three negotiation phases and twenty eight negotiation states and their state transition diagrams. The proposed protocol shows its promising performance in terms of time for negotiation successful rate, negotiation utility and time for negotiation.