A multi-agent based system for e-procurement exception management

  • Authors:

  • Quan Liu;Sherry X. Sun;Huaiqing Wang;Jing Zhao

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Information Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, Hubei 430070, People's Republic of China;Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, People's Republic of China;Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, People's Republic of China;Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, People's Republic of China and School of Information Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, Hubei ...

  • Venue:
  • Knowledge-Based Systems
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

E-procurement has become an important function of enterprise information systems. The process of e-procurement includes the automatic definition of product requirements, search and selection for suppliers, negotiation and contracting with suppliers. However, the adoption of e-procurement encounters various uncertainties from internal and external environments, such as inventory failure, sharp increased demand, and delivery delay. In this paper, we propose a novel agent-based architecture for an e-procurement system in which agent technology is applied to deal with the internal and external uncertainties. Through the collaboration and interaction between different agents, the architecture that we propose can enhance the flexibility to handle unexpected exceptions, thus leading to agile procurement management. To valid the feasibility of our approach, a case study has been conducted to investigate how our agents collaborate to manage the inventory failure exception which occurs in restaurant e-procurement.