Intelligent Agents for Electronic Commerce and Supply Chain Management
In recent years, many researchers and practitioners have focused
on the design of market architectures for electronic commerce,
and on protocols governing the interaction of self-interested
agents engaged in such transactions. While providing support
for direct agent negotiation, the existing architectures for
multi-agent virtual markets usually lack explicit facilities
and infrastructure for handling multiple and varied negotiation
protocols. Since existing market architectures do not provide
such protocols as an integrated part of the framework, they will
have to be extended in order to provide such support.
We have developed MAGNET (Multi AGent Negotiation Testbed), and
architecture that provides
support for complex agent interactions, such as in automated
contracting, as well as other types of negotiation protocols.
In particular, we are interested in business-to-business situations
in which a company outsources production to outside contractors
and needs to automate as much as possible the management of the
supply-chain.
Agents in MAGNET negotiate
and monitor the execution of contracts among multiple suppliers.
Each agent is an independent entity, with its own
structure, goals, and resources. In general, the resources under
``control'' of an individual agent are not sufficient to satisfy that
agent's goals, and so the agent must negotiate with other agents in
its environment in order to meet its goals.
We distinguish between two agent
roles, the Customer and the Supplier. A
Customer is an agent who needs
resources outside its direct control in order to carry out his plans.
In response to a Request for Quotes, some set of Supplier agents may offer
to provide the requested resources or services, for specified prices,
over specified time periods.
Once the Customer agent receives bids, it evaluates them
based on cost, risk, and time constraints, and selects the optimal set
of bids which can satisfy its goals. Suppliers are then notified of their
commitments, and the Execution Manager is called to
oversee completion of the plan. Plan maintenance includes
re-negotiating existing commitments, re-bidding portions of the plan,
re-planning, and abandoning the goal.
Here is a screen shot of the Plan/RFQ generation screen. The
current TaskPlan is represented by a Table view (in the
upper left-hand corner) and a Gantt chart view (in the upper
right-hand corner.) The thin line trailing each
Gantt object depicts the amount of schedule slack each task has
allotted to it. The lower half of the screen allows for editing
of the TaskPlan, as well as specifying RFQ-related parameters
before submitting an RFQ.
We have developed a highly tunable anytime search algorithm
for bid evaluation. The algorithm is based on simulated annealing
and incorporates cost, coverage, temporal feasibility, and risk.
The Customer agent's objective is to maximize utility, which requires
minimizing cost and risk of not accomplishing the goal.
To determine which bids (or parts of bids) to accept, the Customer agent
considers coverage (we assume that there is no point in accomplishing
only a part of the goal), temporal feasibility (the time windows for
tasks must allow to compose them in a feasible schedule), cost, and risk.
Risk factors include elements such as
availability of suppliers, supplier reliability, profit margin,
expected cost of recovering from supplier decommitment or delay, loss of
value if the end date is delayed, cost of plan failure.
A screen shot of the Bid Evaluation portion of
the customer GUI. When a bid is highlighted in the table below,
the corresponding tasks in the TaskPlan table (upper left-hand corner) are
highlighted, and Gantt objects representing those bid
components are superimposed over those Gantt objects. Both Bids
and Tasks can have slack tails representing flexibility in
execution timing.
Papers:
-
Alexander Babanov, John Collins, and Maria Gini,
"Risk and Expectations in a-priori Time Allocation in Multi-Agent
Contracting,", to appear in First International Joint
Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Bologna,
Italy, July 2002.
-
J. Collins and M. Gini,
"Bid evaluation for coordinated tasks: an Integer Programming formulation,"
IJCAI-2001 Workshop on Economic Agents, Models, and Mechanisms, July
2001.
-
J. Collins and M. Gini,
"A testbed for multi-agent contracting for supply-chain formation,"
Workshop on Agent-Based Approaches to B2B, at Agents'01, May 2001.
-
J. Collins and M. Gini,
"An integer programming formulation of the bid evaluation problem for
coordinated tasks,"
in Electronic Auctions, (Brenda Dietrich and Rakesh Vohra, eds.),
IMA Series, Springer Verlag, to appear, 2001.
-
J Collins and M. Gini,
"Exploring decision processes in multi-agent automated contracting",
Technical Report, TR 00-53, University of Minnesota, 2000.
An edited version appeared in IEEE Internet Computing, pp 61-72,
March/April 2001.
-
J. Collins, C. Bilot, M. Gini, and B. Mobasher,
"Mixed-Initiative Decision Support in Agent-Based Automated Contracting",
Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Barcelona,
Spain, June 2000.
-
J. Collins, R. Sundareswara, M. Gini, and B. Mobasher,
"Bid Selection Strategies for Multi-Agent Contracting in the presence of
Scheduling Constraints,"
in Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce II, (Alexandros Moukas, Carles
Sierra, and Frederik Ygge, eds),
Lecture Notes in AI, Vol 1788, Springer-Verlag, 2000.
-
J. Collins, R. Sundareswara, M. Tsvetovat, M. Gini, and B. Mobasher,
"Multi-Agent Contracting for Supply-Chain Management",
Technical Report 00-010, University of Minnesota, January 2000.
Available (in pdf) from
http://www.cs.umn.edu/tech_reports/
-
J. Collins, R. Sundareswara, M. Tsvetovat, M. Gini, and B. Mobasher,
"Search Strategies for Bid Selection in Multi-Agent Contracting"
Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce (AmEC-99), at
IJCAI'99, Stockholm, Sweden, August 1999.
-
J. Collins, M. Tsvetovat, R. Sundareswara, J. van Tonder, M. Gini,
and B. Mobasher,
"Evaluating Risk: Flexibility and Feasibility in Multi-Agent Contracting",
Agents'99, Seattle, May 1999. A longer version is available as
Technical Report 99-001, University of Minnesota, January 1999.
Available (in pdf) from
http://www.cs.umn.edu/tech_reports/
-
J. Collins, C. Bilot, M. Tsvetovat, M. Gini, and B. Mobasher
"Plan Execution by Contracting in a Multi-Agent Environment",
Workshop on Agents for Electronic Commerce and Managing the
Internet-Enabled Supply Chain, Agents'99, Seattle, May 1999.
-
J. Collins, M. Tsvetovat, C. Bilot,
R. Sundareswara, T. Lee, M. Gini, and B. Mobasher,
"A Framework For Mixed Initiative Agent-Based Contracting",
First IAC Workshop on Internet Based Negotiation Technologies,
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, March 1999.
-
J. Collins, M. Tsvetovat, B. Mobasher, and M. Gini,
"MAGNET: A Multi-Agent Contracting System for Plan Execution",
Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Manufacturing: State of the
Art and State of Practice, pp 63-68, AAAI Press, Albuquerque, NM,
August 1998.
-
J. Collins, B. Youngdahl, S. Jamison, B. Mobasher, M. Gini
"A Market Architecture for Multi-Agent Contracting",
2nd Int'l Conf on Autonomous Agents, pp 285-292, Minneapolis, May
1998.
-
E. Steinmetz, J. Collins, M. Gini, and B. Mobasher
"An Efficient Anytime Algorithm For Multiple-Component Bid Selection
in Automated Contracting" , in
``Agent Mediated Electronic Trading'',
LNAI1571, Springer-Verlag, pp 105--125, 1998.
-
E. Steinmetz, J. Collins, M. Gini, and B. Mobasher
"An Efficient Anytime Algorithm For Multiple-Component Bid Selection
in Automated Contracting",
Workshop on Agent Mediated Electronic Trading (AMET'98),
Minneapolis, MN, May 1998.
-
John Collins, Scott Jamison, Bamshad Mobasher, Maria Gini
"A Market Architecture for Multi-Agent Contracting"
Technical Report 97-15, University of Minnesota, May 1997.
-
John Collins, Scott Jamison, Maria Gini, and Bamshad Mobasher
"Temporal Strategies in a Multi-Agent Contracting Protocol"
AAAI-97 Workshop on AI in Electronic Commerce.
-
M. Tsvetovatyy, M. Gini, B. Mobasher, Z. Wieckowski,
"MAGMA: An Agent-Based Virtual Market for Electronic Commerce",
Applied Artificial Intelligence, special issue on Intelligent
Agents, N. 6, September 1997.
- M. B. Tsvetovatyy and M. Gini
"Toward a Virtual Marketplace: Architectures and Strategies",
First Int'l Conf on The Practical
Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology (PAAM96),
pp 597-613, April 1996, London.
Presentations:
Researchers: