Negotiation and cooperation in multi-agent environments
Artificial Intelligence - Special issue on economic principles of multi-agent systems
Practical genetic algorithms
Unraveling the Web Services Web: An Introduction to SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI
IEEE Internet Computing
IEEE Internet Computing
The WSLA Framework: Specifying and Monitoring Service Level Agreements for Web Services
Journal of Network and Systems Management
On Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
XRANK: ranked keyword search over XML documents
Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
DBXplorer: A System for Keyword-Based Search over Relational Databases
ICDE '02 Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Data Engineering
Agent-mediated electronic commerce: a survey
The Knowledge Engineering Review
Journal of Management Information Systems
A Structural Approach to Measuring Uncertainty in Supply Chains
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
Design and development of agent-based procurement system to enhance business intelligence
Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
A cooperative problem-solver for investment management
International Journal of Information Management: The Journal for Information Professionals
Journal of Electronic Commerce in Organizations
Hi-index | 12.06 |
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 exceptions from internal and external environments such as sharply increased demand, delivery delay and inventory failure. In this paper, we have proposed an agent and Web service based architecture for exception handling in e-procurement. Agent technology is applied to deal with the complex, dynamic, and distributed e-procurement process, while Web service technology is applied to provide scalability and interoperability. In this architecture, different tasks in the e-procurement process, such as searching, negotiating, supplier selection, contracting, monitoring, and exception handling, are assigned to different agents, which are wrapped as Web services. A set of rules for detecting and handling the exceptions is defined based on a basic inventory model and a genetic algorithm is utilized for supplier selection. To evaluate our exception handling approach, we have developed a prototype system, through which a simulation has been conducted to verify the effectiveness of our approach.