Supply Chain Management (SCM) deals with the planning and coordination of resource procuring, product marketing, production scheduling, and end product delivering across multiple organizations. This thesis considers the problems posed by e-Marketplace development and the design of intelligent trading agents for supply chain management in e-Marketplaces. The primary contribution of this thesis is its detailed analysis of the characteristics and properties of a typical e-Marketplace environment, its exploration of optimal trading agent strategies and its discussions of possible enhancements for the state-of-the-art e-Marketplace development and trading agent design. This research is stimulated by the recently introduced Trading Agent Competition for Supply Chain Management (TAC SCM) game scenario, which is a representation of typical e-Marketplaces. TAC SCM is the only competition-based e-Marketplace simulation system that captures the real challenges present in an integrated procurement, production and customer-bidding environment. The game was designed jointly by a team made up of researchers from the e-Supply Chain Management Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Minnesota, and the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS), with tremendous inputs from the research community. This thesis starts with a detailed analysis of TAC SCM e-Marketplaces. We present an abstract model of the game, which consists of the market demand and market supply models. A series of experimental results that indicate the correctness and effectiveness of the strategies will then be presented, followed by the presentation of a new negotiation mechanism for the TAC SCM component market and the presentation of a new supplier model to demonstrate how negotiation strategies can be applied in automated negotiation. We explore the areas where the current TAC SCM scenario can be improved, followed by an outline of proposed enhancements to the TAC SCM e-Marketplace mechanism. Finally the thesis concludes with a discussion of future research directions. / Master of Science (Hons.)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/189040 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Zhao, Kanghua, University of Western Sydney, College of Health and Science, School of Computing and Mathematics |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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