Automated Negotiation for Supply Chain Finance

The growing importance of supply chain finance and the possibility of digital descriptions for goods and services increase the urgency of providing sophisticated solutions for automating negotiations in this area. Multi-agent systems technology plays an essential role in this regard. This paper highlights the specifics of automated negotiations and describes financial supply chain actors as agents. It also describes the complexity of possible supply chain finance solutions. A scenario for automated decision making for the best financing option is explained and the negotiation flow of a multi-agent system implemented in Java Agent Development Framework is demonstrated. The negotiations, in the form of an auction, are aimed at minimizing the capital costs of the supply chain. Here, it is important to weigh up whether internal financing via an investor within the supply chain or external financing via the capital market is more advantageous. The different roles of the supply chain finance agents capital demander, investor and capital market are described in detail. The use of so-called HelperAgents for the negotiating participants capital demander and investor as negotiating agents within a supply chain finance negotiation protocol is also explained.