MANS3C: An agent-based multi-attribute negotiation framework for construction supply chain coordination

There are many problems in construction process, such as fragmentation, budget overrun, time overrun and high waste, most of which are supply chain problems and often caused by the lack of coordination and information sharing across organizations in the supply chains. Supply chain coordination (SCC) is a critical success factor for the application of supply chain management to effectively improve construction performance. An agent-based multi-attribute negotiation framework for construction SCC (MANS3C) is designed, which adopts the agent technology and regards construction supply chain as a typical multi-agent system. This framework integrates the specialty agents (contractor agent, designer agent, supplier agent, owner agent, etc.) and service agents (coordinator agent, monitor agent, name server agent) into a multi-agent system on the Internet to improve decision-making efficiency and information sharing. Since different participants in the supply chain have different preferences on decision-making attributes, such as cost, time, quality, safety and environment, a multi-attribute negotiation mechanism is established by constructing a multi-attribute negotiation model, describing the multi-attribute negotiation process, and designing the multi-attribute negotiation protocol. The establishment of this mechanism is based on the negotiation theory and utility theory, and aimed at promoting the coordination between specialty agents. A prototype system is developed and tested on a hypothetical construction project. The test indicates that MANS3C can solve problems in construction supply chain and provides a solution to construction SCC.