Multi-agent Coordination Mechanisms And Its Application In E-commerce Supply Chain Management Research

Electronic commerce is changing the economic idea and pattern which have developed for hundreds of years, with a great force which has never appeared in the history; whose impact is direct on commerce, and indirect on each aspect of the society and economy; it is also pushing the third revolution of the human society since the first and second revolution of agriculture and industry. Since the middle and end of the 90s in the 20th century, SCM ( Supply Chain Management) is becoming an important approach to enhance the competitive ability of enterprises. E-SCM, which is the combination of EC and SCM, is an inevitable development trend of the era.Agent technology is a great breakthrough of the distributed artificial intelligence, while the core of agent technology is multi-agent cooperation. This thesis is a research of multi-agent cooperation and its applications in e-SCM.The contributions of this thesis are the following aspects: Firstly, analyzes the characteristic of e-SCM and its relationship with logistics and stock, and the theory of multi-agent cooperation.The core of this thesis is a model of multi-agent cooperation, named TOAC( Task Oriented Acquaintance Coalition ).This thesis defines task domains, coalition, agent acquaintance relation, social organization and trust degree of acquaintance coalition mechanism in TOAC; analyzes coalition formation and convention of TOAC; analyzes task allocation and execution approach; finally gives the result of simulation experiment and compare of different cooperative model. From the simulative experiment and comparing of different cooperative model, we find that TOAC cooperative model can solve multi-agent social organization, social convention, social evolution, coalition strategies, coalition stability, collaborative problem solving and task allocation in open and distributed multi-agent systems; can organize multi-agent cooperation, enhance system dependability, reduce resource cost and system communication bottleneck problem; can share the task and result of multi-agent, andcan reach the global optimal of multi-agent utility in task oriented domains; from time performance, TOAC model is better than CNP( Contract Net Protocol) of R.Smith , Blackboard cooperative model of Newell and the Result Share model of Smith and Davis.This theis also builds a real e-SCM system which is based on multi-agent cooperation; puts forward the XACL communication language which is based on KQML, FIPA -ACL and XML language, and establishes an agent communication platform based on XACL which is brought forward in this thesis; finally, realizes an integration of e-SCM system which is based on Web Service and can implement as a universal system in different enterprises and platforms, and solve the distributing and heterogeneous problems of different hardware and software system in e-SCM.